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Comedy Actors Who Died Young

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    #51
    Originally posted by jwdd27 View Post
    Warren Mitchell hadn't reached 40 when he started playing Alf Garnett
    That's amazing. With hindsight, I clearly should have guessed – but unlike Dad's Army, I've never seen so much as a minute of Till Death Do Us Part so I've never had the chance to gauge his appearance 'in the flesh', hence all my mental image is based on still pictures and cultural osmosis of Garnett as a cantankerous old man. Yet of course Warren Mitchell survived for decades seemingly unchanged because he'd aged-up so young (just as Clive Dunn did) – which is how he was able to live a full 50 years after first becoming Alf Garnett.

    By the same sort of token, there's the seemingly insane contradiction in terms that was Last of the Summer Wine: a show that made new series for 37 years and became the world's longest-running sitcom, despite being focused from the start on a group of men theoretically heading – as the title hints – into the autumn of their years. Of the central cast members when it began in 1973, Bill Owen as Compo was actually around 59 (and would appear for 26 years), with Peter Sallis and Michael Bates as respectively Clegg and Blamire only around 52; when Brian Wilde's Foggy replaced the latter in 1976, he was merely 49. As the decades rolled on, of course, the surviving characters became pretty properly elderly by any standards; by the time it finished in 2010, Sallis and Frank Thornton as Truly were nearly 90.

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      #52
      Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
      One of the kids is now the keyboard player in the The Levellers, which always struck me as an odd career move.
      'One of the kids' from 'what', sorry?

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        #53
        I assume that they mean 2point4 Children.

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          #54
          Apologies, yes.

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            #55
            Quite a leap of both market demographic and social status, then.

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              #56
              Peter Sellers was only 54.

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