Leslie Schofield spent forty years as the officer or the policeman whose name you never catch, and did it without fuss. Given a whole series at last in The Smoking Room, he was handed one note and played it honestly.
Fi1m perspective
He is on the Death Star in Star Wars (1977), an Imperial officer with a line or two, and gone before you have learned who he is. The following year he is Sub-Commander Raiker in the first episode of Blake's 7 and an interrogation officer in Force 10 from Navarone. That is the shape of it. For the better part of forty years British film and television put Leslie Schofield in a uniform, gave him something to say in the voice of a man used to being obeyed, and moved on to the stars.
He came to acting in the late 1960s by way of the Fleet Air Arm and repertory theatre, and we think the naval years show: his officers and policemen stand like men who have actually been drilled. Doctor Who used him twice, as Leroy in The War Games (1969) and Calib in The Face of Evil (1977). He is Tom, Reginald Perrin's son-in-law, in the third series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1978), a programme we rate highly and one in which he is, honestly, part of the furniture; Leonard Rossiter is the show and everyone else is holding the door. Then came the long middle of a character actor's life: Casualty, Heartbeat, Midsomer Murders, and three years in EastEnders (1997–2000) as Jeff Healy, who proposed to Pauline Fowler and was turned down, having already passed through the programme a decade earlier as Brian Wicks.
The Smoking Room (2004–2005) finally gave him a chair and kept him in it. Len is a widowed security guard who raised his sons alone, swears freely, and holds a childlike devotion to Disney films. Brian Dooley writes him on one note, an old man's certainty about how things used to be, and hits it too often. But the note itself is cleanly struck. Schofield never asks for sympathy and never plays Len as a fool. We did not expect to be touched by a gruff old man defending cartoons, and we were, a little, because he does it without a wink, as if it were the most reasonable position a person could hold.
He never carried anything and never seemed to want to; the record is four decades of supporting and guest parts, the last of them Amos Brown in Midsomer Murders (2006), after which he stopped. Watch Reginald Perrin for Rossiter, as you should, and The Smoking Room for the whole cast, which is better than it was given credit for. Schofield is the kind of actor who is in your memory of a dozen programmes without being in your memory of any of them. Len is the one time the camera stayed on him long enough to fix that.
Biography
Leslie Schofield is an English actor. Born on 12 December 1938 in Oldham, Lancashire, he began acting while serving in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. After performances in naval productions, including a prize-winning role in a 1963 drama festival, he left the service and entered repertory theatre.
Schofield appeared as an Imperial officer in Star Wars (1977). On television he has played roles in Doctor Who, Blake's 7, EastEnders (as Jeff Healy from 1997 to 2000, and earlier as Brian Wicks), The Smoking Room (as Len, 2004–2005) and Midsomer Murders (2006). His screen career ran from the late 1960s until the mid-2000s.
