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Peter Dennis: 1933 – 2009
Peter Dennis, the British actor who toured for decades in his one-man show of readings from Winnie the Pooh and other AA Milne classics, died on April the 18th of cancer at his Shadow Hills home in the east San Fernando Valley. He was 75.
His show, Bother! – taken from a favourite exclamation of Pooh’s – was performed in more than 100 venues in the United States and Europe, including the Hollywood Bowl and Westminster Palace in London.
In addition to Winnie-the-Pooh, Dennis drew from The House at Pooh Corner and the poetry volumes When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.
Just as Milne had, the actor bristled at the notion that the books were aimed at children.
To mark Pooh’s 50th birthday, Dennis gave an impromptu late-night reading in 1976 at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge, and was stunned to find himself performing before a packed house.
Peter John Dennis was born Oct. 25, 1933, in Dorking, England, to Michael Henry Dennis and the former Violet Frances Lockwood.
At 29 he saw his first play, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (with Derek Jacobi) at Birmingham Rep, and knew he wanted to act. He immediately resigned from GKN to take small acting parts in a theatre in Birmingham. Three years later he graduated from Rada and began appearing regularly in British stage, film and television productions.
In 1991 Dennis moved from Britain to Los Angeles and took guest roles in dozens of television shows, including Murder, She Wrote, Knot’s Landing and the final episode of ER. He also worked on the films Sideways and Shrek.
In 1996, to celebrate Pooh’s 70th birthday and to mark the death of Christopher Robin Milne, Dennis read the complete Winnie the Pooh canon, completing the task in slightly under 13 hours.
When presenting the unscripted Bother! Dennis was never sure how he would fill his 90 minutes of Milne but invariably began, "Wherever I am, there is always Pooh."
With his first wife, from whom he was divorced, Dennis had a son, Shane, who died in his late 30s in 1994, the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting in St. Louis. In addition to Diane, his wife of 30 years, Dennis is survived by a brother, Michael, of England, and a sister, Dorothy Barker of New Zealand.
Posted: May 4th, 2009
Author: Floresiensis
Categories: AA Milne
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