In the early 2000s, British actor Anthony Head was living in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from his family, filming for the supernatural teen drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was the role that defined his career — as the socially awkward British librarian Rupert Giles — but the pain of being apart from his family was excruciating.
Head, who has died aged 72 due to complications related to pneumonia, said in a 2016 interview that being away from his wife, Sarah, and their two daughters, Emily and Daisy, was something he couldn’t put into words. “Even now, I feel emotional about it. It was a real test,” he told The Guardian. “I’d try to go home to them every three or four weeks. The production team would work dates around me, and every time I got the chance to have six days clear, I’d get on a plane.”
As Giles, Head guided a generation of Buffy fans as the imperfect mentor of the series — playing the fiercely protective father figure to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s titular character — a storyline that quickly evolved to be the emotional heart of the series. As the show progressed across its seven seasons, it emerged that underneath that bumbling Britishness, those tweed jackets and wire-rimmed glasses, was a character with real emotional complexity, awkwardly navigating love, loss and friendship like the teens who were learning from him. He was adored as the show’s uptight watcher, surrogate father and ex-rebel with a past in dark magic.
Buffy is so acclaimed today because it was an allegory for growing up. In many ways, Giles was the dad guiding everyone through that same process. In season two episode 14, when Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, who turns out to be a 240-year-old vampire, Giles comforts her with words of assurance. “You must be so disappointed in me,” Buffy tells him, to which Giles replies: “All you will get from me is my support. And my respect.”
Being a father figure was a consistent theme in Head’s personal life and career. Hailing from a multi-generational family of actors, Head’s daughters Daisy and Emily both had opportunities to work with their dad on-screen. He acted alongside Emily in the 2008 Disney show The Invisibles and with Daisy on the 2018 British comedy-drama series Girlfriends. “Two of them did Doc Marten,” he said proudly of his daughters on the U.K. chat show This Morning in 2018. “It’s just wonderful.”
Head’s death comes just months after that of his wife, Sarah Fisher. His daughters said in a statement: “It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many. We know how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues, and fans of the shows he was in – he loved his job very much, and he always considered himself incredibly lucky, to have been able to work alongside such exceptionally talented people, in such wonderful productions, across a career that spanned several decades.”
Their statement continued: “Our grief is far greater than the hole he has left behind, but we know his legacy will live on, in the shows he was a part of, and in the audiences that love them. How lucky we are to know we are able to watch him doing what he loved, even when he is no longer with us.”
Born in 1954 to the documentary filmmaker Seafield Laurence Stewart Murray Head and actor Helen Shingler, Head grew up in Camden and quickly made his way into acting.
Early on, he took cues from his parents. “Acting was there in the very essence of the way we lived,” he told The Guardian in the 2016 interview. “We’d talk a lot about acting and when we watched drama on TV, we’d analyse it deeply afterwards as a family, ad nauseam. Consequently, I got a real mindset about ‘real acting’ and not going over the top.” In a 2013 interview with Metro, he recalled being six years old when he decided he wanted to be an actor. “I was in a little show my mother’s friends organised, playing the Emperor in The Emperor’s New Clothes. I remember thinking: ‘This is the business, this is what I want to do,” he told the publication.
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But Head said that his parents were reluctant when he decided to go into acting. “People think that must have made it easier for me to become an actor, but actually, that’s nonsense,” he told The Guardian. “My mother said, well, if you must, and my father said I needed to have a second string to my bow, so if I didn’t succeed at acting, I’d have something else I could do. Bless his heart, he was fairly controlling.”
Though Head went on to build a long career across stage and screen, U.K. audiences may best remember him from coffee adverts. From 1987 to 1993, he and Sharon Maughan played out a slow-burning on-screen romance for Nescafé Gold Blend, becoming one of the most famous examples of serialized advertising.
Head went on to star in shows including Little Britain, Silent Witness, My Family, The Inbetweeners, Monarch of the Glen and as King Uther Pendragon in the BBC’s popular Merlin series, also appearing in films such as The Iron Lady opposite Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher’s longest-serving cabinet member and eventual deputy, Geoffrey Howe. In recent years, Head appeared in an episode of Netflix’s hit period drama series Bridgerton as Lord Sheffield, the grandfather of Kate and Edwina Sharma, and in a recurring role in the Emmy-winning comedy drama Ted Lasso as former football club owner Rupert Mannion, joining as a series regular for season three.
His wife, animal welfare campaigner Sarah Fisher, died aged 61 in December last year. Head had previously spoken about how he owed his career to his wife, who was essentially operating as a “single mother” when he worked abroad for nine months of the year. “I owe an enormous amount to Sarah,” he once said. “She knew I’d always wanted to work in America and when I got the chance, she said, go for it, I’ll hold the fort here. In hindsight, it gave us all a wealth of opportunity, Buffy ran for seven seasons and I had the best time of my life. There were moments, though, when I thought I was insane and I would really struggle.”
Head and Fischer met when she was working as an administrative assistant at the National Theatre, where he was performing in a production of Danton’s Death. Together for almost 40 years while never legally married, Head had spoken of their strong bond often. “There’s no secret to a long-lasting relationship, although Sarah has said it’s that we spend an enormous amount of time apart,” he joked to The Guardian in 2010.
“A sense of humour is of huge importance. It’s about tolerance and liking the person you’re with. I adore Sarah.” He remarked in 2009: “We laugh a lot together; she’s my best friend as well as my partner.”
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