James Saxon was a British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 character actor

Character actor

A character actor is one who predominantly plays unusual or eccentric characters. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a character actor as "an actor who specializes in character parts", defining character part in turn as "an acting role displaying pronounced or unusual characteristics or...

. He often played aristocrats

Aristocracy (class)

The aristocracy are people considered to be in the highest social class in a society which has or once had a political system of Aristocracy. Aristocrats possess hereditary titles granted by a monarch, which once granted them feudal or legal privileges, or deriving, as in Ancient Greece and India,...

 or middle class

Middle class

The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....

 characters.

Having trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is a drama school located in London, United Kingdom. It is generally regarded as one of the most renowned drama schools in the world, and is one of the oldest drama schools in the United Kingdom, having been founded in 1904.RADA is an affiliate school of the...

, he made a career on screen with leading parts in television series such as the BBC adaptation of Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair (1987 TV serial)

Vanity Fair was a BBC Pebble Mill Production consisting of 16 half-hour episodes. Shot on location and in studio. Locations included Winchester and Thetford. Virtually all the interiors where shot in Studio A at Pebble Mill....

(1987), the ITV comedy Brass

Brass (TV series)

Brass was a British television Comedy-Drama, made by Granada Television for ITV.Set mostly in Utterley, a fictional Lancashire mining town in the 1930s, Brass was a comedy satirising the working-class period dramas of the 1970s and the American supersoaps such as Dallas and Dynasty...

(1983), the brief revival of Poldark

The Poldark Novels

The Poldark Novels are a historical fictional sequence by Winston Graham.The main character, Ross Poldark, a British Army officer, returns to his home in Cornwall from the American Revolutionary War only to find that his fiancée, Elizabeth Chynoweth, having believed him dead, is about to marry his...

(1996), Time Riders (1991) and Brush Strokes

Brush Strokes

Brush Strokes is a British television sitcom, broadcast on BBC television from 1986 to 1991. Written by Esmonde and Larbey and set in South London, it depicted the amorous adventures of a good-looking, wisecracking house painter, Jacko...

(1986).

His occasional guest appearances included Jonathan Creek

Jonathan Creek

Jonathan Creek is a British mystery series produced by the BBC and written by David Renwick. Primarily a crime drama, the show is also peppered with broadly comic touches...

(2001), as a school inspector in Chalk

Chalk (TV series)

Chalk is a British television sitcom set in a comprehensive school named Galfast High. Two series, both written by Steven Moffat, were broadcast on BBC1 in 1997...

(1997), Murder Most Horrid

Murder Most Horrid

Murder Most Horrid is a BBC dark comedy anthology series starring comedian Dawn French. It ran for four series runs, in 1991, 1994, 1996 and 1999....

(1994), Lovejoy

Lovejoy

Lovejoy is a TV series about the adventures of Lovejoy, a British antiques dealer and faker based in East Anglia, a less than scrupulous yet likeable rogue. The episodes were based on a series of picaresque novels by John Grant...

(1993), A Touch of Frost

A Touch of Frost (TV series)

A Touch of Frost is a television detective series produced by Yorkshire Television for ITV from 1992 until 2010, initially based on the Frost novels by R. D. Wingfield....

(1994), Boon

Boon (TV series)

Boon is a British television drama and modern-day western series starring Michael Elphick, David Daker, and later Neil Morrissey. It was created by Jim Hill and Bill Stair and filmed by Central Television for ITV...

(1990) and Oscar Botcherby in the 1985 Doctor Who

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a time-travelling humanoid alien known as the Doctor who explores the universe in a sentient time machine called the TARDIS that flies through time and space, whose exterior...

story, The Two Doctors

The Two Doctors

The Two Doctors is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in three weekly parts from 16 February to 2 March 1985. It starred Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri, respectively...

, alongside both Colin Baker

Colin Baker

Colin Baker is a British actor who is known for playing Paul Merroney in The Brothers from 1974 to 1976 and as the sixth incarnation of the Doctor in the long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who, from 1984 to 1986.- Background:Colin Baker was born in London, but moved north to...

 and Patrick Troughton

Patrick Troughton

Patrick George Troughton was an English actor most widely known for his roles in fantasy, science fiction and horror films, particularly in his role as the second incarnation of the Doctor in the long-running British science-fiction television series Doctor Who, which he played from 1966 to 1969,...

.

James Saxon’s film appearances were less numerous, though his rich tones brought to life many audio adaptations, including some of the works of P. G. Wodehouse

P. G. Wodehouse

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...

.

He died in 2003 from a heart attack.

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