Leslie French obituary

Shakespeare’s impish spirit

Leslie French, who has died aged 94, was rated the best Puck and Ariel of his generation. For nearly half a century no one else could play either part without suffering unfavourable comparison with this diminutive actor, dancer and singer.

Opposite John Gielgud's Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1929) at the Old Vic, French's Puck had such a delicate, mercurial, mooncast charm at once impish and poetical that it was dubbed 'a racing flame'. As a beautifully sung Ariel half-bird, half-spirit, naked except for a loin-cloth to Gielgud's first Prospero in The Tempest (1930), he inspired the sculptor Eric Gill to choose him as a model for one of his symbolic statues outside the BBC headquarters at Broadcasting House. French, who took up painting - and successfully, at Gill's urging - agreed to pose as Ariel. (The story goes that when the BBC authorities first saw Gill's effort at the naked Ariel, they were dismayed at the large size of his penis. After some discussion, Gill agreed to modify it.)

Yet for all French's excellence as a Shakespearean actor, he remained one of the most versatile men of the theatre. Whether as actor, singer, dancer, director, manager or painter, French exuded, even in old age, an eternally ethereal, sprite-like quality, which made him the most entertaining company.

This lightness of touch was to serve him well in almost anything from classical tragedy to musical comedy, ballet or pantomime, Ibsen or Congreve, as a bit-part player in films such as The Leopard and Death In Venice, and on television in Villette and The Singing Detective. While he might be best remembered artistically for the 'swift-winged impartiality' of his Ariel, or his elfin, Pan-like figure as Puck calling imperiously to his master, 'I go; I go; look how I go', French knew how to hook an audience in all kinds of roles, from sinister blackmailer, psychic assassin, gentle cat-lover, silly-ass peer to taunted homosexual.

Born in Bromley, Kent, French made his first stage appearance at the age of seven. The lure of the footlights was so strong that he had to be coaxed off stage with the offer of a bun extended from the wings. Educated at the London College of Choristers, he concentrated on his singing voice, while acting in Jean Sterling Mackinlay's Christmas matinees at the Little Theatre. In 1916 a fellow-student, Edward Gordon Craig, took him to meet his mother, Ellen Terry, who wrote on the inside of the boy's make-up box: 'Whatever you are, be that.'

French sang solo for four years in London and provincial cathedrals and churches, and at the Queen's Hall and the Royal Albert Hall. Then he turned to dancing - ballet, classical, national, step, musical comedy and ballroom - which he took up professionally in the early 1920s. 'I never intended to be a dancer. It was thrust upon me. But without the dance I would never have played Puck or Ariel.' Joining Sir Philip Ben Greet's classical company in 1919, French proved useless as prompter because he got carried away by the plays and ignored the text; but those five years brought an invaluable grounding in Shakespeare.

Meanwhile he got occasional West End work in straight plays and musical comedies, and sometimes choreographed a musical. In 1929 he understudied the legendary, fleet-footed Bobby Howes in the Vivian Ellis musical comedy Mr Cinders at the Hippodrome, and took over the lead as Jim on tour.

At about this time, at the Old Vic, came his Puck to Gielgud's Oberon and his Ariel to the same actor's Prospero. Of his Puck, Herbert Farjeon, wrote: '[It] has spirit, variety and other-worldliness. It is alive with mystery and mischief. It is impish and poetical. It is as quick as a needle and as light as a feather, and responsive to Oberon's slightest movement.' Of French's dance with one of the fairies, the critic had doubts, though he went on to play the role more than 4,000 times.

Other Shakespeare parts, at the Old Vic or at Sadler's Wells in the heyday of Lilian Baylis and Harcourt Williams, or at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park for Robert Atkins, ranged from Poins in Henry IV (Part 1), Eros in Antony And Cleopatra, Feste in Twelfth Night (another favourite), Verges in Much Ado About Nothing, Grumio in The Taming Of The Shrew and the Fool in King Lear. At Regent's Park, from 1933 to 1958, he added the Attendant Spirit in Milton's Comus.

Of this production James Agate observed: 'The brunt of the business, which consists in taking the spirit out of our bodies and giving it an airing in the realms of fancy, rests with the Attendant Spirit, who is rendered by Mr Leslie French in terms of breathless rapture. This can, of course, only be done by having perfect command of one's breathing, which again denotes the highly skilled craftsman. To communicate the incommunicable requires a touch of genius.'

When French recreated the part at the Coliseum in 1946, Harold Hobson wrote: 'In what clear musical tones does Mr French speak his enchanting lines, and how he can make his whole being leap out - snatch, as it were, at a fleeting beauty skimming past us when he flings up his arm to catch the sparkle of a glancing star.'

Among French's other Shakespearean parts were Mercutio in Romeo And Juliet, Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Touchstone in As You Like It, the chorus in Henry V, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He also roamed through numerous modern authors, from Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon to Somerset Maugham and T S Eliot, Emlyn Williams or Christopher Fry and the buffoonery of musical comedy or pantomime. He once played Richard, Duke of Gloucester: not Shakespeare's libellous portrait but an altogether nicer person in a modern play entitled The Sun Of York (Royal Court, 1955).

French would have a go at almost anything if it took his fancy, and it usually took the audience's. But Shakespeare served him best, and he himself served South Africa well from the mid-1950s, staging his favourite author in the open air in Cape Town as long as multi-racial audiences could be guaranteed. They were.

Leslie French was never married.

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