Andrew Sachs dies aged 86
- Actor Andrew Sachs, best known as Fawlty Towers waiter Manuel, has died at the age of 86
- He had been suffering with dementia. His wife says: "I miss him terribly"
- John Cleese has lead the tributes, saying "he was a sweet, sweet man, and it's still a little bit of a shock"
Andrew Sachs has died at the age of 86, it has been revealed.
He passed away in the renowned actors' care home Denville Hall on Wednesday last week and was buried earlier today, Thursday 1st December.
Sachs had developed dementia, a condition that left him wheelchair-bound and unable to speak, according to reports.
His wife Melody said: "My heart has been broken every day for a long time."
Andrew Sachs is now understood to have been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2012. It is the second most common form of the disease after Alzheimer's.
Melody Sachs explained: "It wasn't all doom and gloom, he still worked for two years. We were happy, we were always laughing, we never had a dull moment. He had dementia for four years and we didn't really notice it at first until the memory started going.
"It didn't get really bad until quite near the end. I nursed Andrew, I was there for every moment of it. Dementia is the most awful illness. It sneaks in in the night, when you least expect it. It took a long time for Andy's brain to go. Even about a month before he died he was sitting in the garden and chatting away."
She added: "We're both as daft as brushes, we were married for 57 years, we loved each other very deeply and it was a pleasure looking after him. I miss him terribly."
Born Andreas in Berlin on 7th April 1930, Sachs's father was Jewish and his mother was Roman Catholic. The family fled to Britain in 1938 after his father had been arrested - and later freed - by the SS, where they settled in north London. Sachs began his showbusiness career in the 1950s, with his first screen role alongside Brian Rix in The Night We Dropped A Clanger.
Sachs is perhaps best known for playing the incompetent Spanish waiter Manuel in Connie Booth and John Cleese's hit 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers. He often managed to generate laughs from the studio audience just by saying "Que?". On his role, the actor modestly told the BBC in 2014: "It was just a part I was playing and people seemed to laugh."
Sachs's friend, Blackadder star Tony Robinson, told BBC Radio 5 Live: "It really came as a surprise to him that he had the success that he did. People know him for that one comedy performance, but he was actually a magnificently talented man in a number of fields."
Across his acting career, Sachs also enjoyed roles in the Are You Being Served? film; Hugh And I; Rising Damp; and was most recently seen alongside Kelsey Grammer in comedy Breaking The Bank. He also worked regularly on drama productions and with BBC radio, accumulating many dozens of credits to his name. He was also a photographer and playwright.
John Cleese tweeted: "Just heard about Andy Sachs. Very sad.... I knew he was having problems with his memory as his wife Melody told me a couple of years ago and I heard very recently that he had been admitted to Denham Hall [sic], but I had no idea that his life was in danger. A very sweet gentle and kind man and a truly great farceur. I first saw him in Habeas Corpus on stage in 1973. I could not have found a better Manuel. Inspired."
Speaking later on Radio 4's Today programme, Cleese added: "He was one of the people who got up and roasted me at my 75th birthday, so that was two years ago. At that meal I was sitting next to Melody, his wife, and she said that he was having memory problems. I [then] met him 8 or 9 months ago - we were doing a photograph together for some reason - and I realised then that, although he was there - a very quiet, a very sweet presence - he obviously wasn't totally present."
Speaking about working together, Cleese explained: "I think he's one of the easiest to work with, in the sense that not just that he was totally agreeable, he was a very nice, sweet man... but just that he was a brilliant farceur. It was so easy for us to work out all the physical business, and farce is - I think - the hardest form of acting."
He added: "If you met him, you would never for a moment think he was a comedian. You would think he was a rather cultivated bank manager, possibly retired, because he was quite quiet and poised and thoughtful. Then you stuck that moustache on him and he turned into a completely different human being. He was wonderful!"
Asked to pick out his favourite moment featuring Basil and Manuel, Cleese said some of their very best physical comedy was in the episode The Kipper And The Corpse. "Working out all that stuff... getting the body into the basket, and getting it out again, I think that was so much fun. Occasionally you come across someone who loves physical comedy and, although he was such a quiet demeanour, Andy absolutely loved it."
Concluding, Cleese said: "He was a sweet, sweet man, and it's still a little bit of a shock."
Andrew Sachs died on Wednesday 23rd November 2016. He leaves wife, Melody, daughter, Kate, and Melody's previous sons, Bill and John, whom he adopted.
The BBC and channel Gold have both altered their schedules to re-play classic episodes of Fawlty Towers in memory of Sachs. BBC One will broadcast the classic Communication Problems episode of the sitcom at 7:30pm this Friday 2nd December, whilst on Sunday 4th December Gold has lined up a selection of Fawlty Towers episodes from 6pm, and also scheduled a repeat of the Fawlty Towers Re-Opened documentary at 8:15pm.