Peter Woodthorpe

Peter Woodthorpe
Born	25 September 1931(1931-09-25) York, England
Died	12 August 2004(2004-08-12) (aged 72) Oxfordshire, England
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1956–2000

Peter Woodthorpe (25 September 1931 – 12 August 2004) was an English film, television and voice actor who supplyed the voice of Gollum in the 1978 Bakshi version of The Lord of the Rings and BBC's 1981 radio serial. He also provided the voice of Pigsy in the cult series Monkey and was Max the pathologist in early episodes of Inspector Morse.

In the summer of 1955 he played Estragon in the first British production of Waiting for Godot. He had then just finished his second year at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and expected to return after a run of a few weeks. When the play was successful, faced with the choice of dropping out either from Cambridge or from the play, he chose to stay with the play and his acting career. He also starred as Oxford in the broadway musical Darling of the Day .

Before going up to Cambridge he served as a national serviceman in the Royal Navy, training at the Joint Services School for Linguists as a Russian interpreter.

In 1974, he played writer Honoré de Balzac in the BBC series Notorious Woman.

One famous cameo role was that of Reg Trotter, father of Delboy and Rodney in the 1983 Christmas special, "Thicker than Water", an episode of the BBC sitcom, Only Fools and Horses.

Selected filmography

• Father Came Too! (1963)
• The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
• Hysteria (1965)
• The Skull (1965)
• The Blue Max (1966)
• Lord of the Rings (1978)
• Testimony (1987)
• The Odyssey (1997)

External links

• Peter Woodthorpe at the Internet Movie Database
• Obituary in The Guardian
• Obituary in The Independent
• Obituary in The New York Times