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English actor

Alan Wheatley (19 April 1907 – 30 August 1991) was an English actor. He was a well known stage actor in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, appeared in forty films between 1931 and 1965 and was a frequent broadcaster on radio from the 1930s to the 1990s, and on television from 1938 to 1964. His most prominent television role was the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene as Robin Hood; Wheatley played the sheriff in 54 episodes between 1955 and 1959. Earlier, he had played Sherlock Holmes in the first television series featuring the great detective. In addition to acting, Wheatley was a radio announcer during the Second World War, broadcasting to occupied Europe, where he became a well known voice. Poetry was another of his interests: he translated the poetry of Federico García Lorca and was a frequent reader of poems on air. In his later years he worked mainly in radio, as a narrator, a verse reader and an actor.

Wheatley was born in Tolworth, Surrey, on 19 April 1907, the son of William Henry Wheatley and his wife Rose Eva (née Towers). He was educated at Tiffin School, and was then employed in industrial psychology. He made his first appearance on the stage at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge in October 1928, as Randall Utterword in Heartbreak House, after which he was a member of the repertory company at that theatre and later in Hull. In 1930 he toured as Sir Roger Fairfax in Sweet Nell of Old Drury with Fred Terry, and in 1931 in The Quaker Girl. For nine months in 1934–35 Wheatley was leading man at the Croydon Repertory Theatre, He subsequently toured in Scandinavia and adjoining countries, as Major Petkoff in Arms and the Man and Arnold Champion Cheney in The Circle. In the same year he played Sam Weller in Bardell against Pickwick, adapted from The Pickwick Papers.

In September 1939 at the time of the outbreak of the Second World War Wheatley joined the BBC Drama Repertory Company. From May to September 1940 he was an announcer on the BBC Overseas Service and then until March 1945 he was principal announcer and newsreader for the BBC European Service. He made English translations of several of them; "Lament on the Death of a Bullfighter" was the first to be completed, and was broadcast by the BBC in 1946. When BBC television resumed after its suspension during the war, Wheatley played a wide range of characters, from Sam Weller again (1946), to the humorously cynical schoolmaster Rupert Billings in The Happiest Days of Your Life (1949) and the tragic king in Richard II (1950). Wheatley's film credits in the 1940s include Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), The Rake's Progress (1945), Appointment with Crime (1946), Brighton Rock (1947) and Calling Paul Temple (1948). Julian in Ronald Duncan's This Way to the Tomb (which the cast also played at the Studio Champs Elysées in Paris and the Garrick Theatre, London), and Harry in T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion.

In 1951 Wheatley played Sherlock Holmes in a series of six televised dramatisations of Conan Doyle stories. Holmes had been played on television before, in one off adaptations, but this was the first series to feature him. No audio or video recordings of the productions are known to exist. Between 1955 and 1959 Wheatley is recorded by the British Film Institute as appearing in 54 episodes of the ABC television series The Adventures of Robin Hood as the Sheriff of Nottingham, the perpetual adversary of Robin (Richard Greene). He played the role "with many a villainous smile", as The Times said, but eventually withdrew from it. and although he was regarded by colleagues as "the best high comedy actor in Britain", and "daring", "haunting" and "moving" in various roles, Concurrently with some of the Robin Hood series, Wheatley played Pontius Pilate in a BBC television religious drama series, Jesus of Nazareth first shown in 1956.

In the 1960s, Wheatley continued to broadcast frequently on television and radio. He played Richard D'Oyly Carte in a three part BBC television series Gilbert and Sullivan: The Immortal Jesters (1961), and appeared in episodes of Maigret (1962 and 1963), Doctor Who, where his character was the first ever to be seen being killed by a dalek and Compact, both in 1964. In later years, Wheatley worked mostly on radio, as narrator and poetry reader as well as actor. In 1975, he played Judas Iscariot in the 12 part cycle The Man Born to be King by Dorothy L. Sayers. He acted in adaptations of plays by writers including Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham, and of novels by Alexandre Dumas, James Hilton, Anthony Powell and C. P. Snow among others. He made his final appearance in 1991 in a BBC Radio 4 adaptation of A Day by the Sea, with Wendy Hiller and Michael Hordern, both old friends of his. Wheatley died of a heart attack in Westminster, London on 30 August 1991, aged 84.