John Savident, actor warmly remembered as the butcher Fred Elliott in Coronation Street – obituary
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John Savident, the actor who has died aged 86, was a familiar face in films and on television before being cast in Coronation Street as the loud-mouthed, bumbling butcher Fred Elliott, the role that made him a household name.
In his 12 years in the serial, Savident became one of its mainstays, as his character Fred pursued his brass-lunged courtships of women of a certain age – Audrey Roberts and Maureen Holdsworth, to name but two.
What shone through Savident’s portrayal of the overweight Lothario as a comic grotesque was his background as a classical actor: he had worked on the professional stage for many years, starred in productions at the National Theatre and Old Vic, and appeared in films with the likes of Richard Attenborough, and Laurence Olivier, Savident’s idol, with whom he worked in the 1960s at the Chichester Festival.
As Fred Elliott, with his rich Lancastrian burr, Savident developed the character’s amusing habit of repeating himself, a verbal tic he borrowed from the Warner Brothers cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. “Now I’ll show you how a good roast should be cooked,” ran a typical line of advice to his screen son Ashley. “Still, it’ll be wasted on that Maxine: I’ve seen broom handles with more meat on than that girl, I say broom handles, our Ashley.”
Savident explained that Fred’s repetitious speaking habit derived from the Lancashire mills of the Industrial Revolution when people repeated themselves because of the noise of the looms.
During his time on the Street Savident built Fred Elliott into something of a cult figure, and found himself mobbed by women and invited to appear at various appreciation society functions.
He was at the height of his fame, however, when his personal life was thrust into the public glare following an encounter in a Manchester gay bar in December 2000. Having met a former rent boy named Michael Smith, Savident invited him back to his flat, apparently to discuss theatrical matters, which Smith claimed to have construed as a metaphor for sex. The visit ended with Savident being robbed and stabbed twice in the throat by Smith, who claimed self-defence but after a week-long trial was sentenced to seven years.
Savident said: “I suddenly felt somebody come up behind me and whizz me round, so I was face down on the bed and then I felt a prick on my throat. He said to me something like, ‘I bet you have never met a schizo before’, which was really quite frightening.”
Despite his wounds – the blade passed within an inch of the main artery in his neck – he managed to stagger to a telephone, where in conversation with the emergency operator he made it clear that his first priority was to keep the story out of the newspapers.
Wearying of the grind of recording five episodes a week, in December 2005 Savident announced his decision to leave Coronation Street citing “personal reasons”, rumoured to have been Granada Television’s refusal to meet his salary demands. His character was killed off the following October when on his wedding day he dropped dead on Audrey Roberts’s escritoire.
John Savident was born on January 21 1938 at St Peter Port, Guernsey, into a large Channel Islands family, but brought up at Ashton-under-Lyne on the outskirts of Manchester.
He spent several years in the police, joining the old Manchester city force as a cadet in 1955. His fellow rookies included John Stalker, who went on to become a controversial deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester Police.
On one occasion in the late 1950s Savident came to Stalker’s rescue when he was set upon by a group of barrow-boys from the city’s fruit market; as Stalker went down beneath a welter of kicks, a printer from the nearby Daily Express building telephoned 999 and within minutes the colossus-like figure of Savident appeared on a little police motorcycle and fought the assailants off.
Wearing the collar number C88 PC, Savident pounded the beat in C Division covering east Manchester and impressed with his powerful physique, convivial personality and intuitive police skills.
In his spare time he acted with the Prestwich Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society, of which he became chairman. In 1963 he decided to try his hand as a professional actor, making his stage debut as the Demon King in pantomime at Stoke-on-Trent.
Having made his first television appearance in 1968, Savident had roles in The Avengers, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, Yes Minister (as the foreign office mandarin “Jumbo” Stewart), Sharpe and Holby City, among others; and he landed film parts in A Clockwork Orange, Waterloo, Battle of Britain (in which he shared a scene with Laurence Olivier) and Gandhi.
In the 1970s Savident turned down a part in Coronation Street, preferring to work in the live theatre. He played Monsieur Firmin in the original 1987 stage version of Phantom of the Opera.
In the early 1990s he had been cast as Robert Maxwell in a West End musical about the newspaper tycoon, reportedly winning the part against competition from Robbie Coltrane and John Candy. But the show was cancelled on legal advice three days before the opening night, and a distraught Savident confessed to having been driven briefly to the bottle.
Shortly afterwards he was persuaded to accept a second offer from Coronation Street to join the cast as a regular character.
After leaving the programme Savident returned to the live stage and found abundant work in plays, musicals and pantomime. In 2007 he took the lead in a touring production of Hobson’s Choice. To the discomfiture of his former television colleagues he became a strident critic of the Street, complaining that it was on too frequently, and poorly lit.
A classic-car enthusiast, Savident became a familiar figure on the streets of Manchester at the wheel of his black Morgan. He relished telling stories against himself, and particularly the encounter in Harrods with a woman with a familiar face, and with whom he was convinced he had worked, but whose name he could not recall. After asking how she was doing, whether she was busy and planning anything for Christmas, Savident walked away before realising it was Princess Margaret.
He married, in 1961, Rona Hopkinson, who survives him with their two children.
John Savident, born January 21 1938, died February 21 2024
