‘There are unfortunately a lot of us old guys around’

Peter Vaughan has been delivering fine performances for decades — Grouty in Porridge and Robert Lindsay’s prospective father-in-law in Citizen Smith, among many others — but it is only lately, since he became a pensioner, that a large swath of the population has finally put his name to his face.

His performance as the Alzheimer’s sufferer Felix Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North and his wonderful turn as Anthony Hopkins’s father in The Remains of the Day were the parts that finally did it for him. ‘They were my favourites,’ says the 84-year-old actor. He adds, however, that he has another film now that is every bit as special to him — Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, which opens this week. He plays Uncle Alfie, the elder statesman of a feuding family which gathers to bury a relative.

Matthew Macfadyen, one of his co-stars, told him that he could quite happily have kept on working on the film for a couple of years because there was such a great atmosphere on the set. I ask Vaughan if, with so much bonhomie, he ever corpsed. Bad move.

‘I don’t do that,’ he says, his flinty, pale blue eyes suddenly narrowing. ‘I remember when I was making Straw Dogs the director, Sam Peckinpah, said he never wanted to see actors laughing at each other because when they are conscious that they are funny they cease to be funny. I can’t bear it when I pay good money to go to the theatre with my wife and we see actors on stage giggling with each other when they shouldn’t be. It is unprofessional.’