The comedian, mimic and actor John Sessions, who has died of a heart attack aged 67, had trouble being John Sessions. “The hardest part you’ll ever play, honey, is yourself,” he told an interviewer in 1994. Instead, he transformed himself into other people. His breakthrough 1987 one-man West End stage show, The Life of Napoleon, for instance, was described thus by one critic: “In the course of a few sentences Sessions is liable to change voices from Olivier to Lofty of EastEnders, include a pun and a simile, refer to Picasso and Faulkner and move from the battle of Jena to a golf course. It is exhausting, exhilarating and mostly very funny.”
Sessions made his name on TV in the comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1988-91), in which contestants (other regulars included Stephen Fry and Josie Lawrence) would improvise sketches suggested by the studio audience. He was in his element, imagining how James Joyce would spend a day at the beach, or how Hemingway might behave at the dentist. When the contestants were asked to impersonate the person they would least like to be trapped with in a lift, Paul Merton said: “Hello, my name is John Sessions.”
Sessions took it on the chin: “A lot of people found me infuriating – they thought I was a smart aleck, but I did try not to be.” And yet on that show, and others, including the BBC’s panel show QI, he never wore his learning lightly, outsmarting the erudite Fry in the first episode of QI in 2003 by knowing Michelangelo’s dates of birth and death.
Unlike many of his peers, he had not been to Oxbridge, and he had failed to complete his PhD thesis on the poet John Cowper Powys. Had he become Dr Sessions, wrote one armchair analyst, “perhaps he would not feel compelled to display his erudition; but then he would have been lost to the stage, which would have been a pity”.
The smart aleck image stuck, so much so that when Spitting Image produced a puppet of Sessions in 1989, he was represented disappearing up his own fundament. Sessions was singular in having served on the show both as impressionist (his 40-voice repertoire included Prince Edward, Laurence Oliver, Norman Tebbit and Keith Richards) and target. His appearance as a rubberised member of Kenneth Branagh’s Brit Pack discombobulated Sessions: “Suddenly on the telly I saw this brilliant puppet with this funny tie and baggy cheeks and it was me going up my ass. That was quite scary. I thought, ‘Am I going up my ass?’”
Such self-doubt was typical. Sessions was prone to depression, said he loathed his appearance, and was given in interviews to self-laceration. In 1999 he told the Sunday Times: “Some nights, I can’t get to sleep and lie there looking back on my life and eventually nod off thinking, ‘I’m completely useless and hopeless, talentless and should fuck off.’” He was not mollified when the interviewer told him no one else had ever had that thought about him.
He was born in Largs, Ayrshire. His father, John Marshall, was a peripatetic gas engineer, and a Protestant; his mother, Esmé (nee Richardson), was a Glaswegian Catholic ostracised by her family when she got married. He had a twin sister, Maggie, and an older brother, Bill, who was 12 when the twins were born. “I remember thinking I mustn’t cause my parents any trouble, because they were that much older.”
He liked to be at home with his mother: “We used to have a sort of confidentiality of humour. We’d find funny the unacknowledgedly absurd. Which I think is the type of stuff I do, and which still makes me laugh.”
When John was three, the family moved to England, eventually settling in St Albans, where he was educated at Verulam school. He did his first impersonation aged seven, singing Lonnie Donegan’s Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley, partly to impress his father.
He went to Bangor University to read English with the aim of becoming a teacher. Then his father organised a personnel job for him at the gas board. “I told Dad it was boring, and the next thing he knew was that I was going off to do a PhD in Ontario.” He found Canada cold and depressing, and said that his uncompleted dissertation consisted of “200 pages of rubbish”.
Aged 26, he returned to the UK and applied to Rada. He arrived at his audition with a hangover. “I did Benedick’s ‘This can be no trick …’ from Much Ado. Hugh Cruttwell [Rada’s principal] said: ‘That was terrible. You weren’t acting, you were doing an impersonation of what an actor sounds like.’” But a second performance, from Pinter’s The Homecoming, won him a scholarship. Better, it led to a lifelong friendship with Branagh, a fellow student, who later directed him on stage in The Life of Napoleon and in the film version of Henry V (1989) and his comedy In the Bleak Midwinter (1995). Finding there was another John Marshall in Equity, he changed his name to Sessions.
When he left Rada, he said, “my plan was to try and do two careers at once – to be a comedian and an actor. For some years, I managed to juggle the two, but I never felt I joined either club.”
He worked the comedy circuit in London, sometimes appearing on the same bill as French and Saunders, often doing rarefied material, such as imagining Milan Kundera’s version of the TV soap Dallas. He would cement his brand as abstruse improv virtuoso with the TV shows John Sessions’ Tall Tales (1991) and John Sessions’ Likely Stories (1994).
In 1994, in an interview promoting his performance in Kevin Elyot’s Aids drama My Night With Reg, he was asked by an interviewer if he was gay. “I said ‘Yes I am, but my parents don’t know, and I don’t want them to find out by picking up a copy of the Evening Standard.’ The journalist said she thought I should tell them and outed me. My mother died unexpectedly six weeks later, and my father quickly developed dementia. It was never mentioned.”
Sessions explained his compunctions about telling his parents about his sexuality. “They weren’t going to go to their graves hating me or throw me out of the house, but they were born before the first world war and they might have died thinking it was their ‘fault’.”
One night at the Criterion theatre during My Night With Reg, Sessions forgot his lines and had to leave the stage. “It wasn’t stage fright, because I’d been on for six weeks. It was because everything got too much for me. I’d been home for Christmas and found that my father, who was suffering from a mental illness after my mother died, had filled the fridge full of presents for her.”
After that, he did not return to theatre for many years. “I should have gone to the RSC or the National and done four or five plays, really worked my arse off. Some good old-fashioned graft would have done me the power of good. But I couldn’t face a play again.” Only in 2013 did he return to the stage, in his friend the novelist William Boyd’s play Longing. “I thought it was going to lead to all kinds of interesting things, but I wasn’t killed in the rush.”
He never recaptured the fame of his first few years in TV. “I had a twinkly couple of years, but then I ran out of steam,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “As I was getting older, I wasn’t getting more confident, I was getting less confident. I lost my way.” Arguably, he found it again through his talent for mimicry, when he starred in and co-wrote Stella Street, the 1997-2001 BBC series that imagined a street in Surbiton populated by movie stars.
Mimicry served him well in later triumphs on TV and in the cinema. He was Geoffrey Howe in Margaret (2009), Harold Wilson in Made in Dagenham (2010), Ted Heath in The Iron Lady (2011), Norman Tebbit in The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011), and in 2015 he was note perfect as Arthur Lowe performing Captain Mainwaring in We’re Doomed! The Dad’s Army Story. His later roles were mainly minor ones, but he stole the show as Dr Prunesquallor, oleaginous royal physician to the House of Groan in the 2000 adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.
Away from stage and screen, Sessions claimed to be a loner. “I like the solitary life,” he once said. Latterly, the man of a thousand characters found consolation in playing the role of an ageing buffer drifting rightwards politically. He had once supported Labour but later voted for Ukip, saying that “the European Union is the biggest money-wasting piece of shit” and that the Scottish parliament should be scrapped. “I’m pretty much one character really,” he reflected. “A grumpy old fool.”
He is survived by his sister and brother.
• John Sessions, actor and comedian, born 11 January 1953; died 3 November 2020
