Obituaries Geoffrey Chater-Robinson (B3 1935-38) The distinctive actor Geoffrey Chater, who died at the age of 100, was a familiar face on countless television drama series from Dixon of Dock Green to Callan, The Cleopatras and The Bill. Although he had a veneer of superiority about him, a sheen of hauteur, Geoffrey was rarely cast as a villain. Instead, his default mode of disdainful pride gave him a natural, not necessarily attractive, authority on stage and screen. A curling lip and a cruel gaze, allied to a preternatural sense of timing – he rarely played any scene in a rush – created a presence that belied his average height and build. On film, he is best remembered as the school chaplain in Lindsay Anderson’s If…. On stage at the Royal Court, he was a Tory minister called Alice in Howard Brenton’s Magnificence. Geoffrey’s status as an Aunt Sally of the establishment could be deflected more subtly through playing a variety of lords, dukes, lawyers and doctors. Geoffrey was born in Hertfordshire to Peggy, an actress, and Laurence Chater-Robinson. Geoffrey first determined to become an actor himself when he saw his mother play the juvenile lead in Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain.
After Marlborough, Geoffrey joined the army and was soon promoted to the rank of captain in the Royal Fusiliers. He saw active duty in India and Burma, where he wrote and performed in comic revues. On repatriation in 1946, he dropped the Robinson part of his surname and went straight into weekly rep at Windsor, followed by spells in Hereford and Birmingham, making a West End debut in 1951 as a constable in Master Crook.
Geoffrey was a member of the MCC and enjoyed shrimping at Camber Sands near his home in East Sussex. He married Jennifer Hill in 1949. She and their daughter, Annabel (PR 1975-77), and two sons, Simon (PR 1965-70) and Piers (PR 1968-73), survive him.
He was at the Old Vic for the 1954-55 season and on television in 1957. His big break came with the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 when, in an experimental season at the Arts Theatre, he played a suburban stockbroker in Everything in the Garden and the Duke of Florence in Women Beware Women. This led to prominent billing in Domino, a French farce at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and, in 1965, the role of a rich landowner married to Ingrid Bergman in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.
(C3 1935-39)
Geoffrey was now established as an actor of both style and reliability, landing many key roles on the stage through the ‘70s. He also appeared in a few more films including Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi in 1982, in which he was a British government advocate grilling General Dyer after the 1919 massacre of peaceful protesters at Amritsar.
Grant de Jersey Lee
Grant de Jersey Lee was born in 1921 in Sri Lanka on a tea estate that was managed by his father. When he was four he had appendicitis and his father took him for treatment. On returning they discovered his sister had contracted amoebic dysentery and had died. Grant always wondered if these events were why he was so passionate about medicine. He left school just before the outbreak of the Second World War to study medicine at St Thomas’. In 1944, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war he was posted as Regimental Medical Officer to Khartoum and Suez. He enjoyed some aspects of the war although he maintained that he was not very brave. Once he was sent to recover some wounded soldiers under German shelling and was terrified. However, he soon realised that the shells were falling in front of the rescue party and that the Germans were in fact clearing a safe route through a minefield for them to attend the wounded.
Geoffrey Chater-Robinson
On returning to London, Grant decided that he needed more scientific training so The Marlburian Club Magazine
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