WARREN Mitchell, the actor best known for his turn as Alf Garnett in the hit BBC comedies Until Death Do Us Part and In Sickness And In Health, has passed away at the age of 89. His family said in a statement today (Saturday): "He has been in poor health for some time, but was cracking jokes to the last."

Mr Mitchell, who lived in Sheldon Avenue, Highgate, had served in the Royal Air Force before reading physics at Oxford University. He didn't finish the degree, deciding instead to go to RADA and follow an ambition to be an actor.

Garnett, the belligerent, bigoted cockney always at odds with his family, became a household favourite over 125 episodes. Comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted today: "Alf Garnett was one of the most influential and important characters and performances in comedy history."

Speaking to an audience at Burgh House in Hampstead, Mr Mitchell once said: "Alf Garnett has been good to me, and he is still a part of my life. I mean, he owns the house where I live in Highgate; he certainly paid for it.” 

Acting work had initially been hard to find, however, and Mr Mitchell had worked as a porter at Euston Station, a labourer at the Walls Ice Cream factory and a worker at the Standard Bottle Company in Bounds Green. He was considering giving up on acting when he got his first real breakthrough – an audition for the TV version of Hancock’s Half Hour. 

“Sid James said to me, ‘just go in and do your funny foreigner, and you’ll get the job’. And he was right,” Mr Mitchell recalled. "It was all live in those days, which was incredibly nerve-wracking, and we would all get very nervous, especially Tony Hancock. When he came on for my first scene with him and Sid, he dried stone dead, live on television. I went up to him and said: ‘Master Hancock, a word in your ear. . .’ and I fed him the line. After the show he looked at me and said: I’m never doing a show without you – you’re in.”

In 1979, Mr Mitchell caught the eye playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre – a performance many people consider the strongest of his career. Mr Mitchell liked to tell the anecdote of when Miller himself came to see the show.  “He said to me ‘Warren, you’re my favourite Willy'," said Mr Mitchell. "And I said to him, 'I bet you say that to all your Willy's.'"

Locally, Mr Mitchell was twice among the famous faces who publicly backed the New Journal's successful campaigns to save services at the Whittington Hospital in recent years. He had a bugbear of his own: the fireworks and noise at the Kenwood summer music shows, which he complained disrupted life for people living to the north of the Heath. "We are planning to move away over the summer," he once told the New Journal, although he never did. "It’s awful – you can not sit in the garden at all and simply contemplate nature.  As well as the noise from the concerts, there’s some terrible MC making inane comments disturbing the peace. It’s noise pollution.”

Mr Mitchell added that noise from the firework displays accompanying the concerts had forced him to give his dog tranquillisers, explaining: “Our little dog gets very trembly and has to hide under the bed. I asked the organisers last year why they had to have fireworks at all and they said it was one of the main attractions. I asked them why they didn’t just get rid of the music and have the fireworks instead.”

Mr Mitchell is survived by his wife Constance and three children.