John Edmunds, who has died aged 94, was an actor, linguist and a television newsreader before becoming a university academic and an authority on Shakespeare and French classical drama.
As a young man in the 1960s he was also one of the question masters on BBC Television’s Top of the Form, the general knowledge quiz for schoolchildren launched on radio in 1948 before the screen version began in 1962. From 1979 Edmunds was head of drama at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and founder-director of what became its department of theatre, film and television studies.
For 12 years from 1985 he was professor of drama at the University of the Americas in Mexico and the University of California in Santa Cruz. On his return to Britain he appeared in several stage productions including his own drama, verse and prose recitals.
A familiar boyish face on BBC TV News, he usually preferred to conceal his talents as a linguist, once finding the French city of Lyon spelt (in English style) Lyons in the script: “I pronounced it, wickedly, like the king of the beasts,” he recalled. “It didn’t go down well. I pronounced the ‘s’ in Marseilles as well, but the pronunciation unit soon sent round a corrective.”
Nevertheless, Edmunds took his newsreading seriously. He considered the technical skills were easily mastered, but insisted that not everyone could command the attention, trust and even the affection of viewers by his or her intelligence, authority, warmth and sensitive anticipation of their response to a news story.
“These are the attributes known in showbiz as ‘personality’, that subtle but invaluable quality so envied by those to whom it has sadly been denied,” he declared. “The newsreader is the waiter who carries the dish from the kitchen to the dining table, serving the meal to a diner who is the viewing public.”
Edmunds also had to swerve the excessive effusions of over-enthusiastic viewers, mainly women, one of whom sent him a £50 note (returned with thanks), while another admired the tie he wore to read the news, adding: “My husband would like to borrow it for our daughter’s wedding.”
One Irish lady was firmly convinced that she and Edmunds (a bachelor) had been married for many years and had several children. “I am happy to say they seem to be causing no trouble,” he mused. “She gives me reports of them from time to time, you see.”
The elder son of Welsh parents, John David Edmunds was born in London on April 3 1929. His father was a chief engineer in the Merchant Navy, sailing with the Blue Star line among others, and John was evacuated during the war to Aberystwyth, where he attended Ardwyn Grammar School. Enrolling at Aberystwyth University College, he took a First in French in 1951.
After National Service as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, who sent him to learn Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists to become a translator, he taught French at Henry Thornton Grammar School in Clapham followed by Battersea Grammar School in Streatham. During school and college vacations he acted in his own student repertory company called The Adventurers at Aberystwyth and took them for two summer seasons to Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Pwllheli.
From 1956 his early ventures in broadcasting were with ABC weekend television in Birmingham and Associated Rediffusion as a continuity announcer, combining his weekend shifts with his teaching job, as well as the research he did over three years which led to a PhD in English from the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University.
In 1969 he published a scholarly essay asserting that the poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell borrowed from both Molière (Le Misanthrope) and Shakespeare (Timon of Athens) in his comedy The Sullen Lovers (1668).
He joined the BBC in the early 1960s, presenting Top of the Form on children’s TV (1966-67) before becoming a newsreader in September 1968 alongside Richard Baker, who became a lifelong friend. He occupied that berth intermittently until June 1981, with stints on the regional London TV magazine show Town and Around in 1968-69 and Radio 4’s consumer programme You And Yours in 1972.
In 1969 he returned to schoolmastering, teaching English at Brighton College, while continuing as a relief news reader and writing and compering a quiz on the BBC Overseas Service in which foreign students competed and improved their English. At the same time Edmunds spent three months translating Jean Racine’s Phédre into English blank verse, broadcast on Radio 3 with a cast including Barbara Jefford, Prunella Scales and Timothy West, and which was subsequently applauded by Harold Pinter.
Another Edmunds translation, of Racine’s tragedy Bajazet (Radio 3, 1972), was one of several of the French playwright’s works broadcast on BBC radio. “This production took me by storm,” raved one reviewer. Edmunds’s English version of Racine’s Britannicus (Radio 3, 1978), featured the intrigue and treachery of the Emperor Nero’s Roman court in AD55. In addition he translated some of the plays of Molière, two of which were also broadcast on Radio 3.
Edmunds resigned from the BBC in 1973 to take up the newly created post of director of drama at Aberystwyth. He reappeared in front of the cameras on a year’s sabbatical in 1980, before resuming his career as a university lecturer.
In 2013 he edited a volume of Four French Plays: Cinna, The Misanthrope, Andromache, Phaedra for Penguin Classics. Fluent in French, Spanish, Russian, and also with some Welsh, Edmunds translated Four Major Plays of the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca in the Oxford World’s Classics Series (1997).
In later life Edmunds acted in cameo film roles, appearing as a BBC commentator in the horror movie Lifeforce (1985), the Australian comedy Love in Limbo (1993), the crime short RendezvouswithZack (2000) and a drama The Faces of the Moon (2002).
Although unmarried, he was an enthusiastic family man who enjoyed spending time with his brother and sister, who predeceased him, and his nephew and three nieces who survive him.
John Edmunds, born April 3 1929, died May 3 2023
