Bernard Cribbins

An indefatigable all-rounder, his mantra as an actor was always: “Do your best and be grateful for every single job.”


Because he played so many cockneys, Cribbins was often taken for a Londoner, but in fact he was born and grew up in Oldham, where his father was a labourer and amateur actor. Both his parents sang with a local choir.

His career began aged 14, when he was offered a job as an acting assistant stage manager at Oldham Rep for 15 shillings a week. The female juvenile lead was Dora Broadbent, who later became better known as Dora Bryan.

Cribbins left Oldham in 1947 to do his National Service with the Parachute Regiment in Palestine but returned to the rep two years later to play, among other things, Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Talking to The Stage in 2018, he said: “On the first night I took off my T-shirt and wiped myself down with it, and a man in the front row was sick.”

He left Oldham in 1952 to join the rep in Weston-super-Mare, only to go back up north a couple of years later to join the Piccolo Players in Manchester, with Frank Dunlop, Eric Thompson, Casper Wrede and Dilys Hamlett. The same team, with Michael Elliott and Braham Murray, went on to establish the Royal Exchange. 

By the mid-1950s he was married to the actor Gillian Charles and beginning to be noticed. After appearing in a musical version of The Comedy of Errors, he was cast as the lead in Salad Days, a huge West End hit at the time, and never looked back.

His film debut in 1957 was as a naval rating in Yangste Incident, starring Richard Todd. He never forgot the lighting cameraman telling him not to blink during a close-up “otherwise my eyelashes would look like a couple of giant condors taking off”.

After five or six years of back-to-back movies, including two Carry Ons, he was offered a co-starring role, with Donald Sinden, in Ray Cooney’s farce Not Now, Darling in the West End, which he played for more than a year. He stayed in the West End for another farce, There Goes the Bride, and the revue And Another Thing, with Anton Rodgers, Lionel and Joyce Blair, which was the start of his recording career.

George Martin, a producer and talent scout for EMI Parlophone at the time, recorded a couple of songs from the revue, and commissioned the songwriting team of Ted Dicks and Myles Rudge to write a bespoke ‘novelty’ song for Cribbins. They came up with Hole in the Ground, which reached No 9 in the UK singles chart in 1962, only months before George Martin turned his attention to the Beatles.

Despite the huge success of his follow-up record Right Said Fred, Cribbins decided to concentrate on his acting career. He explained in his autobiography: “I made novelty records, and novelties tend to wear off after a while.”

Cribbins returned to the theatre in 1982 to play the master manipulator Detroit in Eyre’s award-winning revival of Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre. He described it later as “my favourite job of all time, not just because it was such a fantastic show but also because of the ensemble and the company discipline”.

Apart from pantomime – he was a superb dame – his last significant stage role was in the Gershwin musical Lady Be Good at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 1992.

But there were frequent forays into television, including the role of Catherine Tate’s character’s cuddly grandfather Wilfred Mott in Doctor Who, and as the ageing lothario Wally Bannister in Coronation Street. He revealed later that the Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies recycled a lot of Cribbins’ own anecdotes from his time as a paratrooper in his script. 

Having “done it all”, his one professional regret was that he never made an old-fashioned western.

Summing up his boundless appetite for work, Cribbins told the Guardian newspaper: “I like working, I’ve done it since I was 14. It’s a great habit.” 

Bernard Cribbins was born in Oldham on December 29, 1928, and died on July 28, 2022, aged 93.