Actor Peter Sallis died on Monday at the age of 96. Sallis was best known for voicing Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films, as well as serving as a regular performer in the world’s longest-running sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine.
If celebrity is now defined by on-screen melodrama and off-screen scandal, then Sallis was something defiantly different. His humility provided a welcome dose of the ordinary and the unpretentious. Indeed, Sallis’s trademark was his very normality, a surprisingly modest basis for an acting career which spanned 70 years.
He began working as an actor in 1947, but it wasn’t until 1973 that Sallis joined the cast of Last of the Summer Wine. He would appear in all 295 episodes of the show until its cancellation in 2010. Centering on a pastoral village populated (it seemed) entirely by people over the age of 40, Last of the Summer Wine was an oddity in a TV landscape focused on appealing to younger viewers. Sallis played Norman Clegg, a mild-mannered everyman with a dry sense of humor, knocking about with a pair of friends in the Yorkshire hills. The other members of the trio varied, but Sallis was the constant, anchoring the show and playing the straight-man to his eccentric costars.
Later in life, Sallis achieved unlikely international fame by voicing Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit films, a stop-motion animated children’s series which won three Academy Awards. While Wallace was an inventor, odd-job man, and cheese aficionado, he was still the epitome of the good-natured, undramatic English gentleman.
Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park wrote that Sallis “encapsulated the very British art of the droll and understated….he was a unique character, on and off screen.”
