Biography

He may well be the only professional actor to have played both Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis, having interpreted the great detective in Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1980) on TV, and the 'Napoleon of Crime' Professor Moriarty in the burlesque spoof The Newly Discovered Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in front of a live audience on radio.

A RADA graduate of 1960, Geoffrey Whitehead has been prolific in classical roles on the stage with the Bristol Old Vic and during several seasons with the ensemble of the Royal Shakespeare Company. On television from 1962, he has made guest appearances in Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir (1961), The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1971), Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983), Les deux font la paire (1983) and Hercule Poirot (1989). During four seasons of the police series Z Cars (1962), he portrayed two separate characters: PC Ken Baker (season 4) and DS Wilf Miller (seasons 7, 8 and 10). Another regular role saw him as the managing director of a large property firm in the drama series Second Thoughts (1991), set in the dog-eat-dog world of high-powered business.

Whitehead has often played powerful or influential personae in period drama, those including the dour, austere suitor St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre (1973), Roman general Scipio Africanus in The Cleopatras (1983), Russian statesman Vasily Golitsyn in Pierre le Grand (1986), family lawyer to the famous Austrian family of composers in Strauss Dynasty (1991) and a doctor in BBC's excellent adaptation of La petite Dorritt (2008).

Equally proficient in comedy, he co-starred on TV in Second Thoughts (1991) (as boss of a style magazine), Reggie Perrin (2009) (as Reggie's food-obsessed father-in-law), Still Open All Hours (2013) (Wilburn Newbold) and in the long-running sitcom Not Going Out (2006) (Geoffrey Adams). On BBC Radio 4's Bleak Expectations, he voiced assorted doomed members of five evil families (the Hardthrashers, Sternbeaters, Whackwallops, Grimpunches and Clampvultures) in a pastiche of the classic Ealing comedy Noblesse oblige (1949). Whitehead also provided the voice for Death in radio adaptations of Terry Pratchett's novels Eric and Mort.

Whitehead has been married since 1964 to the Irish-born stage and screen actress Mary Hanefey.

- IMDb mini biography by: I.S.Mowis