Actor;
Born: April 7, 1930;
Died: November 23, 2016.
ANDREW Sachs, who has died aged 86, was a little-known jobbing actor in his mid-forties when he was cast as Manuel, the hopeless Spanish waiter in Fawlty Towers. Despite allegations of racism, Sachs went on to create a character who was not only one of the most iconic in the history of British sitcom, but the most popular character on one of Britain’s most loved shows.
Sachs became part of a great double act opposite John Cleese as the irascible hotelier Basil Fawlty. “If it's insulting to the Spanish, what is Basil to the British?” Sachs wondered. Manuel was the nicer character. And the Spanish loved the show too. They changed Manuel’s nationality to Italian in their dubbed version, but only because the jokes about linguistic misunderstandings would not have worked if everyone spoke Spanish as a first language.
The little waiter was forever trying to please Basil, often looking puzzled and inviting further explanation with a simple “Que?” But a broad smile will appear when he feels he has done well. In one episode he puffs himself up to deliver the line “I know nothing!”, which Basil had told him to say when Basil won a bet on the horses and wanted to keep it secret from his wife… except of course Basil now wants Manuel to confirm Basil won the money.
And then poor Manuel will be left cowering when he realises his employer’s short fuse has burnt down and he is about to erupt into physical violence. “Children identify with him,” said Cleese. “Here he is desperately trying to communicate with a parent figure and getting clipped round the ear for it.”
It was not only a different era, but also comedy, rather than reality. It was comedy that was at times violent, slapstick, a little surreal, a dramatisation of subconscious feelings and urges, true to life in many ways and most importantly funny, with the laughs rooted firmly in the characters, as is the case with most classic sitcom.
Sachs was born in Berlin in 1930. He was originally Andreas Siegfried Sachs. His father had won the Iron Cross in the First World War, but he was Jewish and was arrested after Hitler came to power. He was released and fled to London, where his family joined him.
After leaving school at 15, Sachs studied shipping management, but he also acted and found work on stage, radio and television. He had a tiny role in the Ealing comedy Hue and Cry (1947) and was in several farces with Brian Rix. He came to the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, with the farce Dry Rot in 1956 and early TV credits include The Saint in 1962.
Sachs was an experienced farceur, but hardly a star when Cleese hired him for Fawlty Towers. Cleese saw him in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus in the West End in 1973 and cast him in his short Romance with a Double Bass the following year.
Like Manuel, Sachs was cheap – he received £150 an episode for the first series in 1975, rising to £350 in the second series in 1979. There were only 12 episodes in total. There was some talk of the character of Manuel getting his own series, but it did not happen.
In between the two series Sachs actually played a Spanish hotel-owner in the film version of Are You Being Served? (1977). Subsequently he was Trinculo in the 1980 BBC adaptation of The Tempest, he had the title role in The History of Mr Polly (1980) and he starred in the short-lived sitcoms Dead Ernest (1982), There Comes a Time (1985) and Every Silver Lining (1993).
He also served as narrator on various programmes on television and radio and wrote several plays, including an experimental radio play without dialogue. He could not have got further from the role of Manuel than when he played Einstein on Horizon in 1996.
In later years he appeared in 27 episodes of Coronation Street (2009), as Ramsay Clegg, the long-lost half-brother of Norris Cole (Malcolm Hebden), and two episodes of EastEnders (2015), as Cyril Bishop, a hospital patient who makes friends with Stan Carter (Timothy West).
But his most prominent post-Fawlty role was in 2008 as the victim of a rather cruel and ill-considered “joke” by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. They thought it would be a wheeze to phone him up and leave messages on his answerphone to the effect that Brand had had sex with his granddaughter, dancer Georgina Baillie. The messages were then broadcast.
The BBC received thousands of complaints, including one from Sachs. Baillie called for Brand and Ross to be sacked, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined the condemnation and the BBC apologised, as did Brand, though he somehow also managed to mention Hitler in the apology. Brand and two senior executives resigned and Ross was suspended.
Sachs was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2012. He died on November 23, but news of his death was not announced until Thursday, the day he was buried. He is survived by Melody, his wife of more than 50 years. She played a hotel guest in the Fawlty episode Basil the Rat, in which Manuel claims a rat is a Siberian hamster, is keeping it as a pet and calls it Basil. Sachs adopted her two sons from a previous marriage and they also had a daughter.
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