A straight back, a clipped vowel and a habit of addressing people as though they had kept him waiting. Cuthbertson spent thirty years playing officers and husbands who expected to be obeyed, and he was at his best when a director let the type turn cruel.
Fi1m perspective
In Room at the Top (1958) George Aisgill has a French wife, a flat and not much else to do, and Allan Cuthbertson does it by talking to her as if she were staff. Freddie Francis keeps him so far into the shadow that, as we said in our review, he barely needs to act, and the point is that he does not try to. He stands, he speaks, he expects. We disliked him within a minute, and what stayed with us was how little he had to do to earn it: no raised voice, no threat, just a man who has never once wondered whether his wife enjoys his company.
That was the instrument, and it was a made one. Cuthbertson was born in Perth, Western Australia, and arrived in Britain in 1947, which makes the officer's voice a construction rather than an inheritance, and it never once slipped. After stage work in London he moved into film from the mid-1950s, nearly always in uniform: Carrington V.C. (1954), a harassed staff officer in Ice Cold in Alex (1958), Captain Eric Simpson in Tunes of Glory (1960) alongside Alec Guinness and John Mills, Major Baker in The Guns of Navarone (1961). Directors knew exactly what would arrive on set, and for the most part that is what they asked for.
The complaint against him, that he was typecast in the same unsympathetic parts through a decade of war films, is fair and slightly misses the point. Furniture is a job, and he was good furniture. But he was better when a film gave him a private room to be unpleasant in, and Jack Clayton is the director who understood that. Aisgill is the same man as the staff officers, taken out of uniform and put next to Simone Signoret, and the change of setting is what makes him frightening. Performance (1970) cast him as a lawyer, a rare turn away from the military, in a film by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg that had a great deal else on its mind; our own review did not stop for him, and we will not pretend otherwise here.
Then there is Colonel Hall in Fawlty Towers (1975), which is the same bearing, the same vowels and the same expectation of deference, played so that the deference never comes. It is the part most people remember, and it is a good joke about the previous twenty years: the officer who had been stiffening British war films since the fifties, now trying to hold his dignity in a Torquay hotel.
Start with Room at the Top, where he is given a marriage to ruin and does it without moving. Then watch the Colonel, and notice that not one thing about the performance has changed except the film around it.
Biography
Allan Cuthbertson was an Australian actor. Born on 7 April 1920 in Perth, Western Australia, he arrived in Britain in 1947 and began his career on the London stage, appearing as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet at the Boltons Theatre and in other West End productions.
He was frequently cast as military officers in British films of the 1950s and 1960s, including roles in Room at the Top (1958), The Guns of Navarone (1961) and Operation Crossbow (1965). His film credits also include Performance (1970), in which he played The Lawyer, and Hopscotch (1980). On television he appeared in series such as The Avengers, The Persuaders! and Fawlty Towers (1975), as Colonel Hall.
Cuthbertson died on 8 February 1988 in London. He was married to Gertrude Willner.
