Brian Rix

Brian Norman Roger Rix, Baron Rix, CBE, DL (born 27 January 1924) is an English actor and campaigner.

Early years

Rix was born in Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, the youngest of four children. His father, Herbert Rix, and Herbert's two brothers, ran the shipping (and subsequently oil) company in Kingston upon Hull, founded by his grandfather Robert Rix. As a good Yorkshireman, Brian, who was a talented cricketer, only wanted to play for the Yorkshire County Cricket Club (CCC) in his childhood, but when he was being educated at Bootham School, York his ambitions changed. He did play for Hull CC when he was 16 (and after the war for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the Stage and the Lord's Taverners) but during his school days his sister Sheila became an actress and Brian developed the same ambition – to go on the stage. All four Rix children had become interested in the theatre because of their mother, Fanny, who ran an amateur dramatic society and was the lead soprano in the local operatic society. All her children performed in the plays and two of them, Brian and Sheila, became professional actors. Sheila Mercier, as she was known, went on to play Annie Sugden for 25 years in the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm having worked regularly with her brother in the Whitehall farces in the 1950s and 1960s.