Frank Ellis

Frank Ellis was a resourceful character actor who forged long relationships with several regional theatres over a career spanning more than 40 years.

He made his debut alongside a young Derek Jacobi in his hometown’s Birmingham Rep, where early successes included Francisco (The Tempest, 1962), Ben Travers’ Thark with Sheila Gish (1963) and as Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1964).

The same year he moved to Swansea Rep, where he attracted attention as a peppery Sir Anthony Absolute in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals and as a highly charged Reverend Shannon in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana (1965).

In 1966, he joined Salisbury Playhouse to play a hot-tempered Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet. Notable appearances there included Lord Russell in William Douglas Home’s The Queen’s Highland Servant (1967), Eli Jenkins in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, Lloyd in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968) and Edmund (King Lear, 1970).

At Worcester Rep in the early 1970s, he met and married the actor Jenny Burke, the two regularly sharing the Swan stage, including Michael Frayn’s two-hander The Two of Us in 1972.

Later in the decade, he ventured into musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (Westminster, 1978), Fiddler on the Roof (Wimbledon,1980) and The Fantasticks at Liverpool Playhouse (1980).

He proved a formidable villain as the wicked uncle and landlord Doggrass in Douglas Jerrold’s Victorian melodrama Black Ey’d Susan at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon (1987) and was a swaggering Lucius O’Trigger in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals at the Thorndike Theatre (now the Leatherhead, 1988).

At the Palace, Watford, his comic skills came to the fore in Colin Bostock-Smith’s You Must Be the Husband alongside Tim Brooke-Taylor (1990) and Ranjit Bolt’s translation of The Marriage of Figaro with Sylvester McCoy (1991). He returned to Croydon in 1996 as a corrupt pope in Roy Smiles’ Dinner with the Borgias and menaced for laughs as Mr Mushnik in Little Shop of Horrors at York Theatre Royal in 1999.

Later stage appearances included Gorky’s Barbarians (Salisbury Playhouse, 2003) and an admired Jacob in Ibsen’s Ghosts at Harrogate in 2004. His theatre swansong was Appleton in Francis Durbridge’s Suddenly at Home for the English Theatre of Vienna in 2010.

Screen credits included Alan Sillitoe’s Pit Strike (1977), Simon Gray’s Old Flames (1990) and Tony Jordan’s The Fall of Railton FC (2011). On film, he was seen with a raft of Hollywood A-listers in the 2007 fantasy Stardust.

Frank Ellis was born on March 31, 1942, and died on April 10, aged 78. He is survived by his wife and their son Kit. His first son, Stephen, died of cancer in 2019.