Michael Kitchen acts with the corner of his mouth and the half-second before he answers, and for thirteen years of Foyle's War that was enough to hold a whole evening. In films he is the supporting man you remember after the leads have gone.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Michael Kitchen being told something he does not want to hear. The head goes still, the eyes drop for a moment, the mouth tightens by a fraction, and whatever the other person says next, the scene belongs to him. He has spent a career doing less than anyone else in the frame and having it count for more, and critics have been noticing the trick since long before it had a detective attached to it.
He began with small film and television parts from 1970 and stayed small on screen for a long while, which suited him. Berkeley Cole in Out of Africa (1985) is the sort of role he made his own: a friend at the edge of the story, courteous, watchful, gone before you have finished working him out. We found the film handsome and remote over its 161 minutes, and the people at its margins rather better company than the romance at its centre. George Briggs in Enchanted April (1992) and Bill Tanner, M's chief of staff, in GoldenEye (1995) and a second Brosnan Bond followed, all men who stand a pace behind the lead and hold their own.
Then, in 2002, came DCS Christopher Foyle, and with him the only lead most viewers know him for. Foyle's War ran nine series to 2015, written by Anthony Horowitz, with Kitchen producing as well as starring, and it built a wartime detective drama around the fact that its detective barely spoke. The pleasure is in the pauses. Foyle listens, lets a suspect talk himself into trouble, and answers with a look that would be rude if it were not so patient. It is acting that rewards attention, and over a long run it accrues, so that by the later series a raised eyebrow carried a whole scene's worth of information.
The scripts did not always keep up. The later series had a habit of stopping to explain the Home Front to us, at length, as though the audience had wandered in from another programme, and we have sat through more than one lecture on rationing wishing someone would just let the man look at the suspect. That we stayed is entirely down to Kitchen, whose face did the work the dialogue kept trying to do for him.
Since then he has been selective: Hugh Perceval in My Week with Marilyn (2011), some comedy, not much else. He has said of Foyle that "having enjoyed the 30 previous years avoiding definition, it's a privilege to be able to wait for projects that 100 percent fulfill the criteria", which is about as close to a boast as he gets. Start with a middle series of Foyle's War and count how many lines he has; then count how often you knew exactly what he was thinking.
Biography
Michael Kitchen is an English actor and television producer, born on 31 October 1948 in Leicester. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1969, after earlier work with the National Youth Theatre and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.
He is best known for playing Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle in the ITV series Foyle's War (2002–2015), on which he also served as a producer. His film roles include Berkeley Cole in Out of Africa (1985), Bill Tanner in the James Bond films GoldenEye (1995) and The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Hugh Perceval in My Week with Marilyn (2011). He received a BAFTA nomination for his performance as the King in the 1993 television film To Play the King.
