Geoffrey Keen Best known as spymaster "M" in the Bond movies, Geoffrey Keen, who has died aged 89, was a much underestimated character actor. He also rather underestimated himself.
"Most of the stuff I do is rubbish," he would say, "but it's a very exciting thing to get a mediocre part and give it a third dimension - to make a character a real chap instead of being cardboard."
This he did regularly on stage, television and in more than 100 films, including Doctor in the House (1954), Genevieve (1966), Born Free (1966) and six of the James Bond movies - in which he was the secret agent's Whitehall boss, Sir Frederick Gray, known only (like his real-life counterpart) as "M".
What brought Keen's characters to life was his way of separating his own nature from his characterisations. In life an affable, easygoing, cheerful if reserved personality, he brought to much of his film and television acting a deliberation of speech and self-conscious superiority that could irritate strangers.
Why he prospered as such mildly nasty types, Keen never knew. If they were not long-faced jacks in office or outright bullies, they were austere men who looked irritable. Not many actors glowered better than Keen, or frowned to more effect. As customs officer, traffic policeman, manager, doctor, trades unionists or tetchy official, he exercised an easy authority, at any rate in films or on the box.
To the playgoer, Keen was a more important actor, although not as imposing or widely known as his father Malcolm Keen, a celebrated Shakespearean. But Geoffrey's parents had split up before his birth, and as a youngster he hardly knew the man, save as an occasional visitor in a sports car. Born in Surrey, south of London, Geoffrey moved to Bristol in the west of England, with his mother. He was educated at Bristol grammar school before moving on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which he left in 1936. After that, he was hardly ever out of work.
In the West End, before and after the second World War, his reputation was built on the classical stage, in Shakespeare and Shaw, Ibsen and Anouilh, Rattigan and Emlyn Williams. As Florizel, for example, in The Winter's Tale, and as Dan in Night Must Fall (with Donald Wolfit on tour and at Stratford-on-Avon), he showed an intelligence and insight into character which set him apart, even if he lacked his father's charisma.
During the second World War, Keen was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and joined Stars in Battledress, a company that toured plays and revues at home and abroad.
After the war, he returned to the stage at the Arts Theatre Club, Alec Clunes's highly rated anticipation of a national theatre. He was in an arresting drama about resuming civilian life, Exercise Bowler, in which teacup gentility was rudely interrupted by returning soldiers; and also in Ibsen's The Lady From The Sea.
In Othello (with an improbable Jack Hawkins in the title role), Keen proved "a quietly spruce" Cassio, according to Kenneth Tynan, playing the drunk scene "beautifully, giving their full painfulness to its moments of embarrassment". He also made a dashing and romantic Marchbanks to Hawkins's Parson Morell in Candida.
Among Keen's other West End credits were the Turkish military governor in Rattigan's Ross (Haymarket, 1960), in which he transferred to Broadway - as he also did opposite Charles Boyer in Man and Boy (Queen's, 1963). He was also the Bishop of Nevers in Mistress of Novices (Piccadilly) a decade later, and in Alice's Boys (Savoy, 1978), a spy play, with Ralph Richardson.
Meanwhile, he had become a familiar and unsmilingly long face glimpsed in many films (among them The Third Man, Carrington VC, Doctor at Sea, The Angry Silence, Sink the Bismarck!, Spare the Rod, Live Now, Pay Later, Yield to the Night, No Love for Johnnie and Dr Zhivago) and was an ever more regular presence on television.
In such long-running series as The Troubleshooters and The Venturers - in which he strutted short-temperedly about boardrooms - he seized the nation's attention as never before. He wanted to be more likeable, but he rarely got the part.
In Mogul and The Troubleshooters, he ran, quite ruthlessly, an oil company having trouble in the North Sea. He bossed people about with such conviction that top executives from a real oil company invited him to dinner. There, his face struck everyone as fitting the occasion but no one knew why.
Then he was introduced to guests. "I'm on the telly," Keen would explain with a mild, and unfamiliar, smile. "Oh?" Then, after a pause, came the answer: "I'm sorry. We never watch telly."
In The Venturers, Keen was pleased to have a kindlier character, though he could still fume at his underlings in the merchant bank of which he was managing director. Among his other TV credits were Mr Rolls and Mr Royce, Churchill and the Generals, Justice, The Atom Spies, Crown Court, The Ladykillers and Strangers.
Keen married three times: to Hazel Terry, then Madeleine Howell and lastly to Doris Groves, who predeceased him, and with whom he had a daughter.
Geoffrey Keen: born August 21st, 1916; died November 3rd, 2005