Benjamin Whitrow made authority amusing through a fine speaking voice and precise comic delivery. We value his dry supporting performances, with one reservation: in Pride and Prejudice, he can make a detached father rather too agreeable.
Fi1m perspective
In Pride and Prejudice (1995), Whitrow’s Mr Bennet delivers a withering put-down without making a great production of it. The pleasure comes from how precisely he speaks, rather than how much emphasis he applies. We laughed at his put-downs, then found ourselves too willing to excuse his detachment. That is our reservation about a performance we otherwise enjoy: his company is so comfortable that the father’s failings can become easy to overlook.
He had been playing men with some authority long before Mr Bennet. In Quadrophenia (1979) he is Mr Fulford, a long-suffering employer; in Clockwise (1986), a headmaster in a farce written by Michael Frayn. Louis Malle’s Damage (1992) gives him the supporting role of a civil servant. His supporting work across stage, film, television and radio stretches back to the 1960s, with television and voice work becoming his better-known work in the later decades.
Langton’s Pride and Prejudice gives that precise delivery plenty of room, though the ensemble is not always evenly pitched. Alison Steadman’s emphatic Mrs Bennet makes Whitrow’s restraint welcome, while Jennifer Ehle’s finer adjustments reveal how broad some of the supporting work can be. His dryness helps us through the fuss, but it cannot remove the gap between those acting styles. We would not want more emphasis from him; a little more reason to question Mr Bennet’s comfortable distance would help. The series remains an easy recommendation despite that reservation.
Chicken Run (2000) gives him another sort of authority as the voice of Fowler, the pompous ex-RAF rooster. Peter Lord and Nick Park turn the chicken coop into a prison camp, where that military self-importance fits the escape-film comedy. It is a sensible use of Whitrow’s precise delivery, although our enthusiasm for the film rests on the expressive animation and the voices together. Some of the escape-film jokes stretch thin, but the inmates earn our affection. For the clearest sense of Whitrow’s particular appeal, start with Mr Bennet, and keep an ear on how easily he wins us over.
Biography
Benjamin Whitrow was a British actor. He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Tonbridge School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. After national service in the King's Dragoon Guards, he made his stage debut in 1959 and later worked at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Whitrow was best known for his BAFTA-nominated performance as Mr Bennet in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. His film roles included appearances in Quadrophenia (1979), Chaplin (1992), Damage (1992) and Darkest Hour (2017). He voiced Fowler in the animated film Chicken Run (2000) and appeared in television series such as The New Statesman, Midsomer Murders and Wolf Hall.
He was married to Catherine Cook from 1972 and had a relationship with actress Celia Imrie.
