A stage-trained character actor who spent two decades playing the man you should not trust, usually with a flourish, and ended up cast as killers so often that the flourish was all most directors wanted from him.
Fi1m perspective
The name of the part tells you what Tony Beckley was for. Camp Freddie in The Italian Job (1969) is a henchman with a manner, and Beckley made a career out of men like that: villains and unstable types, played with an eccentric or camp edge that let him be noticed in a crowd of harder faces. He was rarely the lead. He was the one you remembered from the third scene.
He came to it the long way, through RADA and provincial repertory and a run of television guest roles in the early 1960s, before Orson Welles put him in a tavern as Ned Poins in Chimes at Midnight (1965). We rated that film highly, and the faces round Falstaff are among the reasons; Beckley's is one of them. Peter Collinson then used him three times, in The Penthouse (1967), which gave him his first leading part as a psychotic, in The Long Day's Dying, and in The Italian Job. In Get Carter (1971) he is Peter, one of the men around Michael Caine's Jack Carter, in a film we admire for refusing anyone a reassuring decency. Gold (1974) gave him another villain, Doctor Who an eccentric botanist in The Seeds of Doom (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) a comedy turn.
The pattern hardened as he went. The Fiend (1972), his only starring role, has him as a murderous religious fanatic, and by the end of the decade the offers were mostly cold or unhinged killers. He knew it. "I DO tend to get these rather quirky, offbeat people to play," he told an interviewer in 1979, the year of his last film, When a Stranger Calls, in which he is Curt Duncan, the killer at the centre. What is said of that performance, and what we felt watching it, is that the menace comes with a thread of pity for the man, which is not a thing the script was obliged to give him and not a thing every actor in that position would have found.
He died in Los Angeles in April 1980, so there is no late phase to weigh. What there is, in the two films we have reviewed, is a good actor being part of the furniture, which is the character actor's job and no insult. Watch Chimes at Midnight for Welles and Get Carter for Caine, and notice how much the rooms depend on the men standing behind them.
Biography
Tony Beckley (7 October 1929 – 19 April 1980) was an English actor. Born in Southampton, Hampshire, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began his career in provincial repertory theatre before moving into television and film in the 1960s.
He appeared in supporting roles in films including Chimes at Midnight (1965) as Ned Poins, The Italian Job (1969) as Camp Freddie, The Lost Continent (1968), Get Carter (1971) as Peter, Gold (1974), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) and When a Stranger Calls (1979) as Curt Duncan. On television he played Harrison Chase in the Doctor Who serial The Seeds of Doom (1976) and guest roles in series such as The Saint.
Beckley died of cancer in Los Angeles aged 50.
