Bryan Pringle

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. When asked how he would describe his relationship, Bryan stated: "Who knows man." She died in 1999.

Film work

Pringle appeared in many films, beginning with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) as the cuckolded husband, Jack. He also appeared alongside Norman Wisdom in the 1965 film The Early Bird as the treacherous rival milkman, Austin, the role for which he is perhaps best remembered. He continued to be cast in many independent films, such as Brazil, B. Monkey, and Drowning By Numbers.

Television work

Pringle also made regular television appearances, mainly as a character actor. 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 played Len Wiles, the adoptive father of Terry Wiles in the BBC drama On Giant's Shoulders (1979). He appeared in the 80's brilliantly funny TV production of Joe Orton's "Loot" as the police constable with Timothy West and Prunella Scales, Dinsdale Lansden, Tessa Peake-Jones, and Tyler Butterworth.

In 1980 he played the role of Albert Case, the leader of a group of villains in The Professionals episode Weekend in the Country. Other notable appearances were as Barker in the Inspector Morse episode "Deceived by Flight" in 1989, as 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 mid 1980s 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.

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

Death

In later life Pringle lived in Northamptonshire, where he died on 15 May 2002; his body was buried alongside his wife's in the cemetery of St Laurence Church in Brafield on the Green.