Frank Thornton - Telegraph In 1940, on leaving Rada, he made his professional debut, aged 19, in Ireland at the Confraternity Hall at Thurles in Co Tipperary. He played the hearty, florid Brian Curtis in Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears before touring plays round small towns and village halls in the Irish "fit-up" tradition. A year later, back in London, he joined Donald Wolfit's Shakespearean company during its first West End wartime season, playing Fenton and Bardolph in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Strand) and touring as Dewhurst in The Scarlet Pimpernel. As London endured the Blitz, his West End roles included Laertes in Hamlet and Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Strand). After his Mosca to Wolfit's Volpone had been well received at the St James's, John Gielgud engaged him for two small parts in his revival of Macbeth (Piccadilly, 1942); and he took over as Cpl Jones in the West End run of Rattigan's Flare Path (Apollo, also 1942). Enlisting in the RAF that November, Thornton trained as a navigator in Canada, returning in January 1945 to complete his operational training; but the war finished before he could join a squadron. In the summer of 1945 he joined the RAF Entertainment Unit and was discharged in 1947 in the rank of flying officer and joined Southsea rep. He toured as Franzel in Ivor Novello's romantic musical The Dancing Years in 1947-48, and as the hapless Gregory Throstle in Vernon Sylvaine's farce One Wild Oat . After two short-lived West End musicals, he appeared as the Caliph in Hassan at the Dublin Theatre Festival and as Ludovico Nota in Pirandello's Naked (Oxford Playhouse). Back in London in the mid-1960s, he appeared in Charles Wood's Meals on Wheels (Royal Court); a tour of The Little Hut; a spell as a QC in the Savoy whodunnit Alibi for a Judge; and in the musical The Young Visitors (Piccadilly, 1968). In 1970 he gave a typically stolid cameo as Councillor Parker in JB Priestley's Yorkshire comedy When We Are Married (Strand). For two seasons running he was perfectly cast as the long-faced Eeyore in AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (Phoenix, 1971 and 1972). In between his television work on Are You Being Served? he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and as Duncan to Nicol Williamson's Macbeth, first at Stratford-on-Avon and then the Aldwych (1974-75). Thornton re-created the role of Capt Peacock on stage in Are You Being Served? for the Blackpool summer season of 1976. The film of the same name, released a year later, in which the staff of Grace Brothers decamped on holiday to the Costa Plonka, was every bit as dire as the plot. After touring as Sir Justin Holbrook (opposite Donald Sinden) in the farce Shut Your Eyes and Think of England, Thornton continued in the role for a run at the Apollo, and in 1979 appeared in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce at Windsor and in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers at Leatherhead. In 1980 he turned to the French avant-garde in Ionesco's The Chairs (Royal Exchange, Manchester) before an Australian tour of Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus, and as Malvolio in Twelfth Night at Newbury. One of his longest runs was as Sir John Tremayne in Me and My Girl, first at Leicester, then in London at the Adelphi (1984-86). Thornton's other television appearances included the comedy series It's A Square World, The World of Beachcomber and HMS Paradise. He made more than 50 films, among them Crooks and Coronets (1968); Spike Milligan's The Bed-Sitting Room (1969); No Sex Please We're British (1973); The Three Musketeers (1973); Steptoe and Son (1974); The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones (1975); and Gosford Park (2001). On television he appeared in The Taming of the Shrew (1981), Great Expectations (1991), The Old Curiosity Shop (1995) and as the clerk of the court in All Rise For Julian Clary (1996). His interests included music, photography and wildlife conservation. Frank Thornton married, in 1945, the actress Beryl Evans, who survives him with their daughter. Frank Thornton, born January 15 1921, died March 16 2013