Actor and star of Til Death Us Do Part
Born: October 9, 1931;
Died: September 25, 2017
TONY Booth, who has died aged 85, was an English stage, screen and television actor whose most famous role was the outspoken young socialist Mike Rawlins in the comedy series Til Death Us Do Part, the son-in-law and nemesis of racist right-winger Alf Garnett. Offscreen, he was a committed supporter of the Labour Party, and his eldest daughter Cherie, a barrister and Queen’s Counsel, is married to the former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Booth’s half-century acting career did not bring him other definitive parts, so much as allow him to gather a CV featuring small roles in a number of British icons. He made brief appearances in soap operas including Coronation Street, EastEnders and Emmerdale, and played Robin Askwith’s recurring foil Sid in the quartet of of-their-time mid-70s sex comedies which began with Confessions of a Window Cleaner in 1974.
Booth also took parts in films including the acclaimed drama The L-Shaped Room (1962), the British-set John Wayne thriller Brannigan (1975) and Antonia Bird and Jimmy McGovern’s Priest (1994), about a priest going through an existential crisis.
As a young actor he bore a certain combination of physicality, sensitivity and comic timing which made the role of Mike Til Death Us Do Part perfectly suited to him, even though Michael Caine had also apparently been considered.
He appeared in the sit-com between 1965 and 1975, achieving a combination of fame and notoriety as the live-in “Scouse git” object of Alf Garnett’s disgust, a gobby, sofa-dwelling layabout who did little to deflect his father-in-law’s anger. The creator of Til Death Us Do Part Johnny Speight had been drawn to Booth not because of his stage acting CV (he played Hamlet, appeared naked on stage in Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! and appeared in Jim Cartwright’s Night) but because of his heckling of the Shadow Home Affairs spokesman George Brown at a Labour rally in 1964.
Anthony George Booth was born in Waterloo, Liverpool, in 1931 to a family with Irish Catholic heritage, and – with his plans to go to university put aside after his seaman father was injured in an industrial accident – he worked in a dockside warehouse office and at the city’s US Consulate, as well as in national service with the Royal Corps of Signals, developing an interest in theatre while posted to Paris.
Through the latter years of Til Death Us Do Part, Booth gathered an unavoidable reputation as a fierce and unhealthy drinker (the change in him was “terrifying to watch,” said his co-star Una Stubbs), and as a pub scrapper. Although he gave up drinking in 1979 after seriously burning himself in an accident with a drum of paraffin, his love of women was lifelong.
He was married four times (including, for a year, to the Coronation Street actor Pat Phoenix, and to Stephanie Buckley for the last 19 years of his life), and had eight daughters, including Cherie and journalist Lauren Booth.
He was friends with Harold Wilson and Michael Foot, wrote three volumes of memoirs and canvassed for both Cherie and Tony Blair when they stood as MPs, although as a pacifist he was said to be opposed to the Iraq War.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2004 and suffering a stroke in 2010, Booth gave up work and retired to Todmorden in West Yorkshire for the last years of his life.
DAVID POLLOCK
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