Samuel West broke through as the one poor man in a film full of comfortable people, then spent much of the next thirty years playing the comfortable people. He does it well, and the stage suggests there is more than the screen has asked for.
Fi1m perspective
Leonard Bast, in Howards End (1992), is the one person in the film who cannot afford to have opinions, and Samuel West plays him in a story full of people who can afford nothing else. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson get the talk; West gets the consequences. We felt for him more than for anyone else on screen, which is what the film needs: our review called him important to the balance, because sympathy cannot stop with those who can afford to be sympathetic.
It was his breakthrough, and it is worth noticing that it was against type before he had a type. He had been on television since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and after Bast the screen work settled into supporting parts through the 1990s and 2000s, Notting Hill (1999) and Van Helsing among them, usually as the well-spoken man of some education standing slightly to one side of the plot. Period pieces and literary adaptations kept asking for him. The one criticism that attaches to his name is that he has been asked for the same thing rather often, and it is hard to argue with.
Darkest Hour (2017) is the type in full dress. He plays Sir Anthony Eden in a film we found impossible to look away from whenever Gary Oldman was in the frame, and stubborn about making the same point six times without once asking whether Churchill might be wrong. Our review did not single West out, and that is not a slight. The film has one subject and Oldman is playing it; everyone else is there to react, and West does what the part allows, which is not a great deal.
The stage has been kinder. He has played Hamlet and Richard II for the RSC, which is to say the parts the whole evening is about, and his recent work there, in Twelfth Night (2024), has been in the comic vein the screen rarely lets him near. Television has begun to catch up: Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small (from 2020) has given him a lead that people recognise him from, and Slow Horses (from 2022) a recurring part in something sharper. He also directs for the theatre, and once said of himself, "Shakespeare I love, but for an English graduate, I'm incredibly badly read." We suspect he is being modest about the second half of that.
If you know him only as the vet, go back to Bast. It is still the best case for what the screen has mostly declined to ask of him.
Biography
Samuel West is an English actor, theatre director and narrator. Born on 19 June 1966 in Hammersmith, London, he is the son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales, and grandson of actor Lockwood West. He studied English literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
West received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Leonard Bast in the 1992 Merchant Ivory film Howards End. His other film credits include Notting Hill (1999), Van Helsing (2004), Suffragette (2015), Darkest Hour (2017) and voice work as Pongo in 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure (2003). On television he has appeared in The Crown (2016) as Anthony Blunt, Slow Horses (2022–) as Peter Judd, and as Siegfried Farnon in the Channel 5 series All Creatures Great and Small (2020–).
West has directed for stage and radio, narrated documentaries and performed as a reciter with orchestras. He was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his stage role in Enron (2010).
