Career
Richard Burton's description of the acting profession had convinced him that it would be better than completing his chemistry degree and so Mitchell attended RADA for two years, performing in the evening with the Unity Theatre. After a short stint as a DJ on Radio Luxembourg, in 1951, Mitchell became a versatile professional actor with straight and comedy roles on stage, radio, film and television. His first broadcast was as a regular on the radio show Educating Archie, and this led to appearances on Hancock's Half Hour. By the late fifties, he regularly appeared on television: as Sean Connery's trainer in boxing drama Requiem for a Heavyweight (1957), with Charlie Drake in the sitcom Drake's Progress (BBC, 1957) and a title role in Three 'Tough' Guys (ITV, 1957), in which he played a bungling criminal. He also appeared in several episodes of Armchair Theatre (during the first of these in 1958, Underground, one of the lead actors died during the live performance) and The Avengers in addition to many ITC drama series including: William Tell, The Four Just Men, Sir Francis Drake, Danger Man and as a recurrent guest in The Saint.
His cinema début came in 1957 in Guy Hamilton's Manuela, and he began a career of minor roles as sinister foreign agents, assisted by his premature baldness and facility with eastern European accents. He appeared in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (José Quintero, 1961), Carry On Cleo (1964) and Help! (Richard Lester, 1965) and played leads in All The Way Up (James MacTaggart, 1970), The Chain (Jack Gold, 1984), The Dunera Boys (Ben Lewin, 1985) and Foreign Body (Ronald Neame, 1986).
In 1965, he was cast as Alf Garnett in a play for the BBC Comedy Playhouse series, broadcast on 22 July 1965. This was the pilot edition of the long-running series Till Death Us Do Part, with Gretchen Franklin, Una Stubbs and Anthony Booth. The part of Mum, played by Gretchen Franklin, was taken by Dandy Nichols when the programme was commissioned as a series. Mitchell may be best known for his role as the bigoted cockney West Ham United F.C. supporter, Alf Garnett; his real life persona is quite different, being a left-winger, Jewish, and a staunch supporter of Tottenham Hotspur F.C. The show ran from 1966 to 1975, in seven series, making a total of 53 30-minute episodes.
He has a long and distinguished career on stage and television. Other small screen roles include performances in The Sweeney (Thames Television for ITV, 1978), Lovejoy (BBC), Waking the Dead (BBC), Kavanagh QC (Carlton Television for ITV, he played a concentration camp survivor in the episode Ancient History), The Merchant of Venice (BBC, 1980) and Gormenghast. In 2001, he appeared in a Christmas Special episode of Last of the Summer Wine, "Potts in Pole Position".
On stage he received extensive critical acclaim for his performances in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at the National Theatre; and Pinter's The Homecoming and Miller's The Price in the West End, also appearing in Visiting Mr. Green in 2007 and 2008.
After the cancellation of the Alf Garnett sequel series In Sickness And In Health, Mitchell returned to the role of Alf on a number of occasions. ITV aired a series of mini-episodes called A Word With Alf featuring Alf and his friends. When Johnny Speight died in 1998, the series was cancelled at Mitchell's request.
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