Peter Sallis

A bank clerk who repaired radios

Peter Sallis never planned to make a living in front of the camera. He worked as a bank clerk in London, and only the outbreak of World War II pulled him from behind the counter. During the conflict he served as a radio mechanic for the RAF, and it was there that he first stepped onto a stage.

An amateur production of Hay Fever changed his outlook. When the war ended, he won a scholarship to study at the prestigious RADA. He began working in London's West End theaters during the 1950s and 1960s.

And so it was.

In 1958, he took part in the premiere of The Rescuers, and little by little his face became a regular fixture in BBC productions. But Sallis wasn't chasing quick fame. He preferred the steady work of the supporting actor who always does the job well.

The Record of Thirty-Seven Years

In 1973, he accepted the role of Norman Clegg in a pilot episode titled Last of the Summer Wine. No one on the production imagined that this slice-of-life comedy about three retirees in Yorkshire would last for decades. Sallis played the character across 295 episodes over 31 seasons.

He was the only actor from the original cast who stayed with the show from the first day until its final close in 2010. Over that time, the series went from a rural experiment to a British national institution. Filming in Holmfirth gave him a professional stability that very few actors manage to achieve in their careers.

But fate had other plans, made of modeling clay.

In the mid-1980s, a film student named Nick Park wrote him a letter. Park was working on an animated short and needed a voice for an eccentric inventor who loved cheese. Sallis accepted the job without knowing he was founding an empire.

The Fifty-Pound Voice

The actor earned just fifty pounds sterling for recording the lines for A Grand Day Out in 1989. Nick Park spent six years completing that first Wallace & Gromit short. When the film was released, Sallis's voice gave Wallace a humanity and vulnerability that connected with audiences around the world.

And the gamble paid off.

The way Sallis pronounced the word cheese forced the animators to change the character's mouth. Wallace ended up with those wide, expressive lips just to fit the actor's phonetics. Sallis voiced the character in three Oscar-winning shorts and in the feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005.

Despite suffering from macular degeneration that made it hard for him to read scripts, he kept working until his final retirement in 2014. His last recorded contribution to the franchise was in 2010 for the documentary series Wallace & Gromit’s World of Invention.

Sallis died on June 2, 2017 at Denville Hall, a residence for actors, at the age of 96. He was buried at St John's Cemetery in Holmfirth, right beside his castmate Bill Owen. The cost of his funeral and the management of his estate came to 1.5 million pounds, according to probate records from that period.