Bernard Fox: Beyond Bombay

Wales has produced some of the world’s finest actors, Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, a long list, but surely none more beloved than Bernard Fox (Bernard Lawson, 1927-2016).

You can’t imagine my delight when Fox popped up in the key role of Colonel Archibald Gracie in Titanic (1997). He was only 70 then, but at the time I’d thought he was long gone, having associated him with his best-loved role of Dr. Bombay on Bewitched a quarter century earlier. Wonderfully, Fox had also been in the previous best movie about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1957), in which he played one of the look-outs. Nor was this Fox’s last bit of resonant stunt-casting. In 1999 he appeared in The Mummy. His father, actor Gerald Lawson (1897-1973) had been in Hammer’s 1959 version of that spooky tale.

Hence Fox was what we now call a nepo baby, although one doesn’t mind it so much in families of actors and entertainers, at least I don’t. In the theatre it has the ring of a calling, and tradition. Gerald had been an actor-manager in the regional theatre. His wife Queenie, Bernard’s mother was also an actress. The biggest success in the family was uncle Wilfred Lawson (1990-1966), who played Alfred Doolittle in the screen version of Pygmalion (1938), and was also in Ford’s The Long Voyage Home(1940), King Vidor’sWar and Peace (1956), and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963).

Naturally Bernard apprenticed with his folks as a teenager. As a young man he served in the Royal Navy during WWII and the Korean War, which is undoubtedly why you see him dutifully playing a small part in that great patriotic extravaganza The Longest Day (1962). Having first found stage success in Brian Rix’s Whitehall Farces in the early ’50s, he gained a foothold in British film and television, which led to a move to the States a decade later. While Fox is in a handful of movies, his greatest success was in recurring parts and guest shots on television, usually as a cartoonish fish-out-of-water Englishman. As such you could see him on The Andy Griffith Show,The Dick Van Dyke Show, McHale’s Navy, Hogan’s Heroes, Love American Style,Columbo, M*A*S*H,Soap, and dozens of other shows. On The Flintstones, he supplied the voice of Eppy Brianstone, a parody of Brian Epstein, in that disturbing episode where Pebbles and Bam-Bam become an international pop act! He also played Watson in a 1972 TV movie version of The House of the Baskervilles, with Stewart Granger as Holmes.

But it was as the witch doctor, Dr. Bombay on Bewitched (and the spin-off Tabitha) that Fox made his biggest impression. As a kid, this character really captured my imagination. He was presented as a kind of world explorer, presumably scouring the globe for the exotic ingredients required for his potions. When Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) summoned him, he was always caught in the middle of something fascinating or hilarious, always dressed in some outlandish outfit. The default was naturally explorer’s costumes, pith helmets, khakis, parkas and snow shoes, and such like. But then it became stuff like a bull fighters outfit, or a swami’s turban, or what have you. (Naturally, racist, or colonialist presumptions were baked into the concept — as they were pretty much in the whole of the culture). I especially loved his braying laugh and burlesque jokes about his nurse, which made him seem superficial and doltish in a lampoon of the upper classes. Yes, there is much to unpack from the streamer trunks of Dr. Bombay. In keeping with this image, his last role was as the real-life African explorer Henry Morton Stanley on the animated series Time Squad in 2003.