Peter Jeffrey was British cinema's man behind the desk: headmasters, governors, inspectors, sultans. He gave them a clear voice and a straight face, and in the right hands he was more frightening than the script required.
Fi1m perspective
You know the type before he speaks. He has a desk, or a title, or a uniform, and when he does speak it is in that voice: clear, unhurried, faintly pleased with itself. Peter Jeffrey played headmasters, governors, inspectors and officials for thirty years, and the joke, when there was one, was that the man never seemed to know he was the joke. He did not shout. He explained.
He came to the screen from the stage, which you can hear. Bristol Old Vic in the early 1950s, then the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s under Peter Hall, and film and television from the mid-1960s onward. Lindsay Anderson used him three times, as the headmaster in if.... (1968), then as a factory boss, a prison governor and a sceptical surgeon, which is the same man in different suits and was meant to be. Around those he was Norfolk in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Inspector Trout in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Ahmet in Midnight Express (1978) and the Sultan in Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).
The headmaster in if.... is the part to see first. Anderson's school runs on bullying and the film is angry about it, but Jeffrey's headmaster is not a bully. He is an executive, a moderniser, a man who talks about the place as if it were a going concern and never raises his voice. We found him more unsettling than any master with a cane, because he so plainly believes he is on the boys' side. It is a small part, and Malcolm McDowell is the reason to watch, but the film's point about how power sounds once it has stopped shouting is mostly his.
Not every film knew what to do with him. In Anne of the Thousand Days he is one of several well-spoken men in fur standing a pace behind Geneviève Bujold, and the film moves too slowly for any of them to leave a mark; she has the pulse and they have the costumes. He was better served by directors who let him be absurd, as Trout in the Phibes film and as Gilliam's Sultan, and by television, which gave him time. Bulstrode in Middlemarch (1994), the power broker with something to hide, is the late highlight.
Nobody seems to have recorded a reservation about him, and that is its own kind of limit. The films took the type and rarely asked for more; the warmth colleagues noticed came out most on stage, in parts like Falstaff's company in The Merry Wives of Windsor for the RSC in 1985. Start with if..... Then, if you have a taste for men in fezzes and false dignity, the Phibes film. He will not surprise you. He will be exactly, and expertly, the man you took him for.
Biography
Peter Jeffrey (18 April 1929 – 25 December 1999) was an English character actor. He began his career on stage after education at Harrow School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, with no formal drama training. He performed with the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Jeffrey appeared in numerous films and television productions. He played the Headmaster in Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968) and Inspector Trout in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). Other film roles include General Wadafi in The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), Ahmet in Midnight Express (1978) and the Sultan in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). On television he appeared in Doctor Who and The Avengers.
