As the gentle, genteel, and serenely gallant Sergeant Frank Wilson in Dad's Army, John Le Mesurier remains one of the best-loved actors in the history of British situation comedy. With its provocative use of wartime sing-along tunes, perfectly and piously pitched scripts, and an ensemble acting team who instinctively fed off each other's momentum, the series ran from 1968 until 1977. During that time, a stage version, a radio series, and a feature film spin-off opened new doors for the home guard homage. The show is still repeated to huge audience figures.

     Like the majority of the cast, Le Mesurier's major television fame came late and after a lengthy, enjoyable "apprenticeship" on the stage and in film. A jobbing actor for 20 years before finally being recognized as a supporting comic face to be reckoned with, he had made his television debut as early as 1938 and his first film appearance some ten years later. Typically, he was inauspicious and incognito, miles down the cast list and turning in a competent, albeit workmanlike, performance. However, in 1949 he embraced big-screen comedy, when he turned in a majestic contribution as a frustrated and flustered head waiter in Old Mother Ri­ley's New Venture. With an unsmiling, bottled-up tension, furtive eyes, a worried look of impending disaster, and "head-in-hands" dismay at the mayhem all around him, the "type" would hold the actor in good stead for the next 30 years or more. Importantly, much more than the theater, Le Mesurier saw television and film as his natural medium, where every subtle nuance could be captured by the camera and magnified tenfold. His early, major television assignment also allowed him to exercise his great versatility. He played the doctor in the Dorothea Brooking­ produced BBC production of The Railway Children, and featured as the ill-fated and foppish Eduardo Lu­ cas in Sherlock Holmes: The Second Stain, with Alan Wheatley as the great detective (both 1951). He was cast in The Granville Melodramas, a 1955 epic for Rediffusion for director/producer Cyril Butcher. More importantly, that same year, he found his perfect niche in British cinema. Under the wing of the Boulting Brothers, Le Mesurier scored a success in the army satire Private' s Progress opposite Terry-Thomas, and kick-started a glittering run of uneasy, tense, bombastic, and petulant character studies. He clocked up an amazing score of appearances well into the 1970s, effortlessly complementing the world's funniest comedians, from Norman Wisdom to Peter Sellers.

     Displaying a clear skill for comedy acting and reacting, television didn't take long to grab Le Mesurier for a never-ending supply of judges, doctors, military men, and crusty colonels opposite the cream of British comedy talent. Writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, having ushered their hit radio series Hancock's Half Hour onto television, turned to an array of "proper" actors to fully complement the hapless flights of fancy of star comedian Tony Hancock. Le Mesurier proved both a long-standing member of the Hancock repertory company and one of the star's closest friends in the business, appearing in all of his subsequent ill-fated attempts to make it big in feature films. Le Mesurier's contributions to Hancock stand alone: the plastic surgeon in The New Nose, the officious RAF officer in The Lift, the National Trust trustee in Lord Byron Lived Here, the hypochondriac doctor in The Cold. All were. basically the same figure of stem, befuddled authority, but played with real dramatic conviction. Not surprisingly, Le Mesurier would stooge for television comedians for much of the rest of his television career, working alongside Dick Emery, Harry Worth, More­cambe and Wise, and, in the 1960s, on the Galton and Simpson scripted series, Frankie Howerd. It was like Hancock with added innuendo. The actor also found himself featured in celebrity-based American television drama (Douglas Fairbanks Presents and Errol Flynn Theatre) and ATV action serials (Dangermar:: Affair of State, in November 1960) and a starring role in Armchair Theatre: Three on the Old Tar Fiddle with Norman Rossington and Raymond Huntley. Produced by Charles Jarrot, it was broadcast on January 17, 1961. An ever-reliable general-purpose actor was how Le Mesurier liked to see himself, chalking up appearances in The Avengers (Mandrake, January 1964) and Play of the Week (Bachelors, November 1964). His film roles, while almost entirely swamped by comedy fare, throw up excellent opportunities for compelling character studies, notably as the bereaved father in V.11 Guest's superior crime thriller Jigsaw in 1962. Television, sporadically, employed him in equally dramatic presentations, including Sunday Night Theatre: The Trial of Mary Lefarge, with Yvonne Mitchell, and Harold Pinter's Tea Party, the second specially commissioned play for the European Broadcasting Union broadcast on March 25, 1965, and produced by Sydney Newman.

     Le Mesurier himself was less than happy with moving away from his fast-growing reputation for comedy. He was content to "stay in his own backyard" and feverishly work away at developing his standard, scene-stealing persona of officious bureaucracy. His first major television series, the ITV situation comedy George and the Dragon, came at the end of 1966. Although most certainly playing "third fiddle" to the central comic pairing of Sid James and Peggy Mount, Le Mesurier grabbed his featured role of the kindly, tolerant, and deceptively bemused Colonel for whom t1e leading characters work.

The scripts, by Vince Powell and Harry Driver, were never really taxing, but the series, thanks in no small part to the inspired casting, proved extremely popular, running to four series. However, the show's untimely demise was rather timely for Le Mesurier. That same year, 1968, saw the launch of the program that would make him one of Britain's best-loved actors, Dad's Army. His effete, charming, and magnetic style gave him a touch of the Jack Buchanans and proved the perfect contrast with Arthur Lowe's bluff, bombastic Captain Mainwaring. Le Mesurier's Wilson was the lesser man in rank only. Eventually the character became the man and the man became the character. A gentle, trusting, and endearingly vague soul in real life, Le Mesurier seemingly liked to indulge in alcohol, certain substances, traditional jazz, and dreamy days in blissful ignorance. However, his acting career continued to be diverse and diverting during the run of his most popular television series. Although his film output was slightly less prolific than before, the small screen delighted in offering him guest roles in everything from Jason King (1971) to Orson Welles' Great Mysteries (1975). He featured in the Richard Burton and Sophia Loren NBC's Hallmark of Fame remake of Brief Encounter for director Alan Bridges and enhanced a Crown Court case, Murder Most Foul. Dabbling with anarchic comedy, Le Mesurier played a mild­ mannered but mildly-mad scientific farmer in a one-off guest appearance in The Goodies, played a health farm obsessive in a John Cleese-scripted Doctor At Large episode ("Mr. Moon") and even joined forces with his ex-wife, comedy actress Hattie Jacques, in a 1972 episode of Sykes. Stricken with ill health while rehearsing a play, The Miser, in Perth, Australia, he was rushed to hospital and forced to adopt an alcohol­ free lifestyle, which led to his haggard appearance in the last series of Dad's Army. After a year, Le Mesurier returned to moderate drinking and to his old dashing self. A high-profile appearance in Brideshead Revisited, a role in Val Guest's Ealing community styled TV movie The Shillingbury Blowers and a brilliantly emblematic appearance in the final Ripping Yams: "Roger of the Raj," with Michael Palin, followed. Le Mesurier made appearances alongside Jon Pertwee in Worzel Gummidge, narrated the children's favorite Bod, and provided voice-overs for a long-running advertising campaign for Homepride Baking Flour. He also accepted another assignment for David Croft and Jimmy Perry with a single appearance in their "latest" BBC comedy success, Hi-De-Hi, as well as recreating his Dad's Army creation for radio. It was a fitting closure to a career that simply tried and succeeded in spreading as much happiness as possible. He died in 1983 at the age of 71. His dying words, just before slipping into a final coma, were "it's all been rather lovely."