Robert Morley, the portly British actor well-known for his portrayals of droll upper-class Englishmen, died Wednesday after suffering a stroke over the weekend. He was 84.
Family members were at the actor's bedside when he died in a hospital in southern England, his son Sheridan Morley said.Morley was one of the best known stage personalities in Britain but late in life, when he had earned almost all of the plaudits available to a performer, he admitted that he learned most of what he knew as an actor when he was a young door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in the late 1920s.
"In that time," he said, "I learned more about acting than ever before or since on the stage."
There was another surprising facet to his long career. Although he played every possible type of role on stage and screen, it was a matter of wry amusement to him that he became more widely known both in his native country and abroad as the stereotypical upper-class Briton in television commercials for British Airways.
Morley was not only an actor but a director and writer. In the public eye his success lay in his ability to put his own mischievous wit to work for him in dozens of plays and scores of films.
He was known by fellow artists and the media for his talent to entertain at any time without trying. His son, Sheridan, journalist and biographer, said of his father, "He is constantly amused by himself and other people, and this is a great gift."
With his impressive bulk and aristocratic accent, Morley never lacked for offers. His famous delivery helped him become - when the role called for it - every American's idea of, say, a member of the British landowning gentry.