Tom Bell did his best work by doing almost nothing: a flat look, an order obeyed a beat late, a room waiting to see what he thought. Nobody in British television made contempt so quiet, and Prime Suspect is where to see it.
Fi1m perspective
In the first Prime Suspect (1991), Tennison walks into the incident room and asks a plain question, and every man in it looks at Bill Otley before deciding whether to answer. Tom Bell gives them nothing: no nod, no shake of the head, a face that has made its mind up already. Otley, the dead man's sergeant and friend, never disobeys her. He lets each order arrive a beat late, and that is enough. We were angry within half an hour and nobody on screen had raised a voice, which is the whole of Bell's method and the reason it works.
He started in 1959, in Armchair Theatre on television and The Criminal (1960) on film, and by The L-Shaped Room (1962) he looked like one of the new British leading men, in the company of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay. He did not become one. The flinty, unsmiling look that got him Toby in that film also fixed him: the seedy man, the menacing one, the criminal in the corner. He worked steadily through the 1970s, as the armed robber Frank Ross in Out (1978) and as Adolf Eichmann in Holocaust (1978), which got him noticed abroad, and he later called the American film industry "a madhouse".
The parts people remember came late: Eric in Wish You Were Here (1987), Jack 'The Hat' McVitie in The Krays (1990), Antonio in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), and Otley, whom he played opposite Helen Mirren across three series between 1991 and 2006. Our review of The Krays is about the Kemp brothers and Billie Whitelaw, and Bell is not among the reasons we gave for seeing it; he had trained alongside Whitelaw at Bradford, and here he is one of the men her sons have to deal with. Mirren is the collaborator who got the most from him, because Tennison does not flinch, and Otley has nothing to do if the person he is trying to unsettle stays put.
What Bell did that other actors did not was refuse to perform the unpleasantness. Most actors playing a bully give you the bullying. He gave you the other men checking with him first, and let them do the work. The cost was that British film and television knew exactly what to do with him and did it for the best part of fifty years: the man you would not want on your side, with only the odd Greenaway to suggest what else he could do. Start with the first Prime Suspect. Watch the incident room rather than Tennison, and count how many men look at Otley before they open their mouths.
Biography
Thomas George Bell (2 August 1933 – 4 October 2006) was an English actor who worked in theatre, film and television. Born in Liverpool, he trained at the Bradford Civic Theatre School under Esme Church, alongside Billie Whitelaw and Robert Stephens, and began his career in repertory theatre in Liverpool and Dublin.
Bell appeared in early 1960s kitchen-sink dramas including The L-Shaped Room (1962). Later credits included Adolf Eichmann in the television series Holocaust (1978) and Frank Ross in Out (1978). He played Jack 'The Hat' McVitie in the film The Krays (1990) and Detective Sergeant Bill Otley in the Prime Suspect series (1991 onwards). He received BAFTA nominations for his performances in Out and Prime Suspect.
