Paul McDowell (actor)

After leaving school, he trained to be a painter at Chelsea Art College. He later attended St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In the early 1960s as "Whispering" Paul McDowell he was a vocalist with the British 1920s-style jazz band The Temperance Seven, who had a No. 1 hit in Britain. He was a member of the pop group 'Guggenheim' which he formed with Granada Television producer and singer Chris Pye, and guitarist Jules Burns. The album Guggenheim was released in 1972 on Indigo Records, and distributed by the British Decca label. He worked at the Establishment Club as an actor/writer, then became a member of the improvisational group the Second City in the United States and was a writer on The Frost Report.

He passed his later days in Towcester Northamptonshire, where he wrote a letter [2] to the Guardian, published on 11 March 2016, less than two months before his death. His letter was an amusing mild rebuke that the Guardian had omitted to state in their obituary of George Martin that his very first Number 1 hit was the Temperance Seven's "You're Driving Me Crazy".

His television roles include: Mr. Collinson, a sour-faced prison officer in Porridge, Churchill's butler in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, and Mr. Phillips in The Two of Us. He featured in several editions of Dave Allen at Large. Film roles include a Scottish laird in The Thirty Nine Steps (1978).

As a screenwriter he wrote for Sheila Hancock and The Two Ronnies. Later he concentrated on writing and teaching t'ai chi ch'uan.[3]

• The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) - McLean
• Porridge (1979) - Collinson
• Rough Cut (1980) - Postman
• National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985) – First English Motorist
• Mr. Bean (1990) – The Customer (Ep. "The Return of Mr. Bean")
• Chemical Wedding (2008) - Symonds

• Paul McDowell at IMDb