Nigel Davenport played the men who ran things: dukes, majors, lords and tycoons, with a hawk's profile and a voice built for giving orders. Within that narrow brief he was reliably good, and once, as Norfolk, a good deal better than that.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Nigel Davenport in A Man for All Seasons (1966), as the Duke of Norfolk, trying to talk Thomas More out of his principles. Fred Zinnemann's film hands its hero every good line and gives everyone else the worse half of the argument, and Leo McKern's Cromwell plays the villainy on the page. Davenport does something harder. His Norfolk is a friend who loves More and cannot follow him, and he plays the man as honestly baffled that friendship is not enough. In their quarrel we found ourselves, briefly and to our surprise, on Norfolk's side: it is the one scene in which More seems capable of cruelty, and it is Davenport's plain, wounded incomprehension that lets us see it.
That was the breakthrough, and it fixed the type. Davenport had a hawk's nose, a gleaming left eye and a powerful voice, and he carried himself like a man who expected the door to be held. Directors saw an aristocrat or an officer and cast accordingly. The entitlement never looked put on; it looked inherited. It also meant he was rarely asked for anything else.
He had come from the stage, through repertory and Stratford, and was a founder member of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court from 1956. Film began with small parts in 1959 and 1960, among them an uncredited detective sergeant in Peeping Tom (1960). After Norfolk the work was steady through the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in uniform or in a good coat: a lead as Dr Ernest Hubbs in the science fiction film Phase IV (1974), two films with Michael Caine, and two with Hugh Hudson, as Lord Birkenhead in Chariots of Fire (1981) and Major Jack Downing in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). On television there was the tycoon in Howards' Way. He made no screen appearances after 2000.
The complaint about him is fair and he seems to have known it. The theatrical training gave him more than gravitas, a comic energy that the screen almost never called on, and a career spent being the establishment left little room to show it. What he did with the type, though, was give it an inner life, and his own account of the tycoons he played is as dry as anything he said on screen: "What I think they do enjoy is the fight, the competition." That is Norfolk too, a man who would rather have won the argument than been right.
Start with A Man for All Seasons, and watch the quarrel twice. The second time, watch Davenport rather than Scofield.
Biography
Nigel Davenport was an English stage, television and film actor. Born Arthur Nigel Davenport on 23 May 1928 in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, he was educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he became involved in the Oxford University Dramatic Society. He began his career in theatre, appearing with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and in productions including A Taste of Honey.
Davenport worked extensively in film and television from the late 1950s. He played the Duke of Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons (1966) and Lord Birkenhead in Chariots of Fire (1981). Other film roles include Det. Sgt. Miller in Peeping Tom (1960), Dr. Ernest D. Hubbs in Phase IV (1974) and Major Jack Downing in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). He appeared in television series such as Midsomer Murders (1997). He served as president of the actors' union Equity from 1986 to 1992 and died on 25 October 2013 in Gloucester.
