Anthony Head got so famous in Britain for a coffee advert that his serious acting work dried up. So he moved to America and ended up on a hit show about hunting vampires. He died this week at 72, and that coffee advert is the least interesting thing he ever did.
It was for instant coffee. The story started in 1987 with a woman knocking on her neighbour's door to borrow some, and it ran for six years like a tiny soap opera, each instalment ending on a will-they-won't-they cliffhanger. The country got hooked. When the last one aired, around thirty million people tuned in to see if the couple would finally get together, and a newspaper ran it on the front page. There was even a spin-off novel and a hit album, all from a coffee advert.
That kind of fame can trap an actor. The bigger parts stopped coming, so Head went to America and landed Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He played Giles, the school librarian and guardian of a teenage girl who secretly hunts vampires, the calm grown-up quietly keeping her alive. He once said he based the character on Hugh Grant, all stammering and bookish. For seven seasons he was the warmest father figure on television.
Years later he got to play the exact opposite. Ted Lasso is a comedy about a kind American coach loose in English football, and Head was the villain, Rupert, a rich and cheating ex-husband. His former wife wants to hurt him so badly that she hires Ted hoping the team will collapse. Head started as an occasional guest, then joined the main cast, ending up in 18 episodes.
He said the bad guy was the fun part, because a villain has more going on, and he liked playing men who were nothing like him. You can see the care in it. Rupert starts out as a cartoon and slowly turns into something sadder, a man with money, a young wife and a new baby who still cannot enjoy a single thing he owns. By the end everyone around him grows up. He just shrinks.
None of that was him. His Ted Lasso castmate Brett Goldstein said Head "played the worst person in the world," and pulling it off so well took real talent, because in life he was the kindest man on the set. When the news broke, Sarah Michelle Gellar, the young actress he had looked after on Buffy, posted a photo of the two of them. "I'm not okay," she wrote.
He died months after losing Sarah Fisher, his partner of more than forty years. He leaves behind two men named Rupert, one a gentle teacher and one a cruel charmer, and a long line of people who knew him saying the same thing. The gentle one was closer to the truth.
It cant fit more than two nuis i am pushing it to ita limit in the name of science, it does not come with an insert for pins or anything but it can be fixed of course