The Heartbeat actor William Simons also enjoyed a stage career. I first met him when helping to direct weekly rep at Her Majesty’s theatre, Barrow-in-Furness, in 1964. He played Cleante in my version of Tartuffe – the only classical play we dared to produce.
Then he was a permanent member of the Stables company for Granada TV (1969-71), playing Montague in Romeo and Juliet, Lodovico in John Webster’s The White Devil and the Bargee in John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. The company was unique in engaging actors on a contract under which they worked both in television and in a theatre created out of the stables of the oldest railway station in the world.
In 1972 Bill was in The Changeling at the Gardner Centre, Brighton, East Sussex, with Alfred Lynch, Sinéad Cusack and Jane Seymour. The following year I cast him as a barrister in Granada’s Crown Court, along with Richard Wilson and John Horsley, who were also Stables members.
This began long runs for all of them, while I left to direct the Oxford Playhouse company. Bill’s great strength was to play characters older than his real age with weight and a dry sense of humour. He was a good friend and fellow squash player with a calm disposition, treating crises with wit and toleration. He is a sad loss to acting and to his friends.
