Freddie Jones was an actor of extraordinary gifts and I was saddened to read of his passing. Michael Coveney did his career justice in an obituary of detail and relish (Obituaries, 12 July). But Jones’s singular contribution to a number of late Hammer horror films was overlooked, in particular a memorable performance in Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969).
In this, Peter Cushing, as a particularly sadistic baron, was the true monster; Jones played the gentle and sensitive doctor whose madness Cushing cured, but only by dint of transferring the brain to Jones’s body.
David Pirie, in his classic volume A Heritage of Horror (1973; revised edition 1976), disclosed that Fisher had deliberately sought out Jones for the part and that director and actor together created “one of the most overtly sympathetic and moving Frankenstein monsters in the history of cinema”.
It begs comparison with Boris Karloff’s and leads to Jones’s better-known appearance in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in 1980. We will be discovering the full extent of his talent for years to come.
Anthony Roche
Monkstown, County Dublin, Ireland
• There was a puzzling omission in the obituary for Freddie Jones. In 1970 he played Uncle Vanya in the Play of the Month production directed by Christopher Morahan. I played Sonya opposite Freddie.
I have seen many Vanyas but none convinced me as much as Freddie. I’d worked with him previously in Robert Muller’s dramatisation of Emile Zola’s Nana, also omitted from the obituary. Freddie was a unique actor; his strength was that he was absolutely his own person. I will miss him; indeed he will be much missed.
Jenifer Armitage
London
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