[Deathwatch] Lionel Jeffries, actor, 83

[Notification of departing celebrities]

February 20, 2010


  Lionel Jeffries, British Character Actor, Dies at 83

By BRUCE WEBER 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bruce_weber/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

Lionel Jeffries, a mustachioed, bald-pated British character actor who 
excelled in rubber-faced comedic roles like Grandpa Potts in the musical 
fantasy adventure "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," and who directed "The 
Railway Children" and several other family-oriented films, died Friday. 
He was 83.

His agency, the Liz Hobbs Group, confirmed the death to The Associated 
Press without attributing a cause. The BBC 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/british_broadcasting_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
said Mr. Jeffries died in a nursing home in Poole, in southern England.

Mr. Jeffries trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and appeared 
in a number of stage roles, including Colonel Pickering in a 1987 
Broadway production of "Pygmalion" that starred Peter O'Toole 
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/53681/Peter-O-Toole?inline=nyt-per> as 
Henry Higgins. But he is best known for his film work.

His specialties were ineptitude and exasperation; he played sputtering 
bumblers, impatient authority figures, Clouseau-like cops. He was an 
apoplectic ship's captain in the Agatha Christie 
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/216888/Agatha-Christie?inline=nyt-per> 
mystery "Murder Ahoy" (1964); he was a doofus of a secret agent in "The 
Spy With a Cold Nose" (1966); he was a bungling Scotland Yard inspector 
in "The Wrong Arm of the Law" (1963), with Peter Sellers 
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/64447/Peter-Sellers?inline=nyt-per>; 
he was the amiably feckless King Pellinore in "Camelot" (1967). And 
though it was not a comic film, he used his facial flexibility and gift 
for hyperbolic expression as an especially seething and vengeful Marquis 
of Queensberry in "The Trials of Oscar Wilde" (1960).

Most indelibly, he played the loopy Grandpa Potts in "Chitty Chitty Bang 
Bang" (1968), the father of the eccentric inventor of the magical 
titular automobile, played by Dick Van Dyke 
<http://movies.nytimes.com/person/72745/Dick-Van-Dyke?inline=nyt-per>, 
who was actually older than Mr. Jeffries. His signature moment 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNpWBMNyC0w> is the singing of the 
traveling song "Posh!" while standing in an outhouse-size cabin that is 
being hauled over the ocean by a hot-air balloon.

Mr. Jeffries was known to abhor the turn in movies toward sexually 
permissive material after the 1950s, and the five films he directed were 
all family oriented. They included "The Amazing Mr. Blunden," (1972), a 
ghost story involving time-traveling children; "Baxter!" (1973), about 
the breakdown of a teenage boy with a speech defect; "Wombling Free" 
(1977), a film version of an environmentally conscious children's 
television show; and a partly animated fantasy, "The Water Babies" (1978).

His best-known and best-loved film, however, was his first, "The Railway 
Children" (1970), which he also wrote. An irresistibly heartwarming 
adaptation of the Edwardian children's book by E. Nesbit, about a 
Yorkshire family living near a rail station in the early 20th century, 
it was ranked No. 66 by the British Film Institute on its list of the 
best British films of the 20th century.

Lionel Charles Jeffries was born in London on June 10, 1926. Before 
studying acting, he served in the military during World War II in Burma 
(now Myanmar), where the humidity, he said, was responsible for the loss 
of his hair. He was, he liked to say, the only bald student at the Royal 
Academy.

Mr. Jeffries's survivors include his wife of 48 years, Eileen, and three 
children.


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