Peter Bowles

Though he had a long and varied career on stage and screen, Peter Bowles achieved his greatest popular success on mainstream TV as the debonair nouveau riche tycoon Richard De Vere, head of a supermarket and catering chain, forever matching wits with Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton (Penelope Keith) in To the Manor Born (1979). From then on, the London-born actor's stock-in-trade tended to be charming, likeable rogues, rakish lotharios and flamboyant or snobbish posh types. While on screen the very ideal of style and cultivation, Bowles himself came from a relatively humble working class background, the son of Herbert Reginald Bowles (valet, chauffeur and, eventually, butler to English aristocracy) and Scottish-born Sarah Jane Harrison (who worked as a nanny for the Duke of Argyll). His parents met while employed by the family of Lord Beaverbrook. Both worked hard to send their 16 year-old son to drama school at RADA, his mother even taking on night time work at a hospital to pay for his fees.