Face of Nation : Stephen Moore – known as the voice of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’s Marvin the Paranoid Android – has died aged 81. He also played Adrian Mole’s father on TV, and the dad to Harry Enfield’s grumpy teenager Kevin.
Hitchhiker’s producer and director Dirk Maggs said Moore was the “most sweet, charming and affable of men”. He paid tribute to “an amazing, varied career”, adding that he was best known for the role of Marvin.
The first series of Hitchhiker’s appeared on Radio 4 in 1978, and after being adapted for TV in the 1980s, it returned to the airwaves in 2003.
In it Marvin is a failed prototype robot with “genuine people personalities”, which has led him to struggle with severe depression. Maggs said: “That was the thing that won the hearts of people, Marvin is the most miserable character but people seem to love him. “It was Stephen’s voice that made that happen.”
He was Major Robert Steele in Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far. He played teenage diarist Adrian Mole’s father George on TV, and the dad of Melody and Harmony Parker on children’s show The Queen’s Nose.
Maggs said: “I’ll always remember the story of him getting locked in a mic cupboard in the Paris studio at the BBC, and they forgot he was in there and went out to lunch. “He was an infinitely professional actor, would put up with any discomfort and waited to play his part.
“And then outside the working situation he was the most sweet, charming and affable of men.” Actor Ben Barnes – who worked with Moore in a West End production of The History Boys – wrote on Twitter that “he was a sensitive, brilliant actor and a funny, lovely man”.
