Bryan Pringle

Bryan Pringle
Pringle in The Early Bird (1965)
Born	(1935-01-19)19 January 1935 Glascote, Tamworth, Staffordshire, England, UK
Died	15 May 2002(2002-05-15) (aged 67) London, England, UK
Years active	1960–2002
Spouse(s)	Anne Jameson (1958–1999)

Bryan Pringle (19 January 1935 – 15 May 2002) was a British actor who appeared for decades in television, film and theatre productions.^[1]

Life and career

Born in Glascote, Tamworth, Staffordshire but brought up in the Lancashire town of Bolton he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1958, he married character actress Anne Jameson; together they had two children. She died in 1999.

While much of his TV career was as a character actor, he also appeared in many films, beginning with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) as the cuckolded husband, Jack. He was a regular in director Ken Russell's work, commencing with the part of Charles Pooter in Diary of a Nobody, made for BBC 2, in 1964. He also appeared alongside Norman Wisdom in the 1965 film The Early Bird. He continued to be cast in many independent films, such as Brazil, B. Monkey, and Drowning By Numbers. He played Len Wiles, the adoptive father of Terry Wiles in the BBC drama On Giant's Shoulders (1979).

Pringle is best remembered for playing Norman Wisdom's nemesis, the treacherous rival milkman Austin in "The Early Bird" (1965), Barker in the Inspector Morse episode "Deceived by Flight" in 1989, landlord Arthur Pringle in Series 2 of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and as a friend of Eddie Royle in EastEnders in 1991. Pringle also appeared in the late 1970s in a well-known TV commercial advertising Heineken beer, in which he plays a cockney voice tutor attempting to teach a posh girl how to say with a cockney accent "The wa'er in Major'a don' tas' li' wot id ough' 'a." [written as "The water in Majorca don't taste like what it ought to"] instead of her normal "The water in Majorca doesn't taste quite how it should." After a sip of the beer she begins to pronounce it with a cockney accent.^[2]

Pringle officially opened the first Meadows Festival in Edinburgh in 1975.

In later life, Bryan lived in Northamptonshire and is buried alongside his wife in the cemetery of St Laurence church in Brafield on the Green.^[3]

Selected filmography

• The Challenge (1960)
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)
• The Sundowners (1960)
• The Bulldog Breed (1960)
• Spare the Rod (1961)
• H.M.S. Defiant (1962)
• The Brain (1962)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
• Ring of Spies (1964)
• French Dressing (1964)
• The Early Bird (1965)
• Berserk! (1967)
• Diamonds for Breakfast (1968)
• Spring and Port Wine (1970)
• Cromwell (1970)
• The Boy Friend (1971)
• Jabberwocky (1977)
• Brazil (1985)
• Haunted Honeymoon (1986)
• Consuming Passions (1988)
• Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Television roles

References

External links

• Bryan Pringle at the Internet Movie Database
• Obituary in The Independent
• Obituary in The Telegraph