Michael Medwin

Life and career

Medwin was born in London. He was educated at Canford School, Dorset, and the Institute Fischer, Montreux, Switzerland. He first appeared on stage in 1940.

Medwin's West End theatre credits include Man and Superman, The Rivals, Love for Love, Duckers and Lovers, Alfie, St Joan of the Stockyards, and What the Butler Saw. At the National Theatre he played a season which included Weapons of Happiness (Ralph Makepeace), Volpone (Corvino) and The Madras House. He appeared in Black Ball Game at the Lyric Hammersmith. He also played Lloyd Dallas in one of the casts of the long-running production of Noises Off in the early 1980s.

He is probably best known for his role as radio boss Don Satchley in the BBC television detective series Shoestring, and playing Scrooge's nephew Fred in the musical film version Scrooge, as well as for his role in The Army Game, a British television comedy series of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With Bernard Bresslaw, Leslie Fyson and Alfie Bass, he took the theme tune from The Army Game into the UK Singles Chart in 1958, where it peaked at number 5.

As well as his role in Shoestring, he played Colin's boss Mr Langley (of the Langley Book Of Horror) in the Mel Smith comedy series Colin's Sandwich.

He made many film appearances, including Carry On Nurse (1959) and The Longest Day (1962), before turning to producing films. Among the films he produced for Memorial Enterprises, a company he established with actor Albert Finney, are Charlie Bubbles (1967), directed by Finney, and Lindsay Anderson's If.... (1968), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He worked again with Anderson on O Lucky Man! (1973), continuing the story of the Mick Travis character from their earlier film. Medwin has been quoted many times as saying "I knew at a young age I was going to be an actor: acting has always been in my bones". He has also said that Charles Laughton and Edward G. Robinson were the two biggest influences in his life of acting, and that being appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), in the 2005 Queens Birthday Honour's List for Services to Drama is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to him.

As a play producer, his work includes Spring and Port Wine, Alpha Beta, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, Forget Me Not Lane and Another Country. Medwin formed with David Pugh in 1988, David Pugh Limited, a West End and Broadway theatrical production company, of which he is still chairman.