Maurice Denham, 92; British Radio, TV Actor Had ‘a Thousand Voices’

Maurice Denham, 92, a durable British character actor whose voice and face were more easily recognized than his name on both sides of the Atlantic, died July 24 in London of natural causes.

The son of a dentist, Denham became an apprentice engineer but always wanted to act. He joined a repertory company in 1934, and within two years was on the London stage. But radio became his principal metier, with the “man of a thousand voices” first heard on a 1938 BBC broadcast about the history of flight.

Denham made his reputation with two much-loved BBC radio classics in the 1940s, “It’s That Man Again” and, after his four years as an army artillery officer during World War II, in “Much Binding in the Marsh.” His credits included about 1,000 radio broadcasts, 100 films and countless television programs as he voiced a panoply of characters from the pigs of “Animal Farm” to crooks, clergy and kings.

To Americans, he is remembered for a key role in the television series “Rumpole of the Bailey” and in such movies as “The Day of the Jackal” and “Our Man in Havana.” Denham was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992.