British character actor Peter Vaughan passed away on Tuesday. According to The Guardian, Vaughan was well known in the U.K. for his sitcom appearances, particularly as Grouty on the most British-sounding show ever, a prison comedy called Porridge. But you probably know him best as Maester Aemon on Game of Thrones.
Maester Aemon of the Night’s Watch, a mentor to both Jon Snow and Samwell Tarly, died in Game of Thrones Season 5. Until the upcoming Game of Thrones Season 7, which will dramatize Daenerys Stormborn’s invasion of Westeros, Maester Aemon will have been the only living Targaryen in Westeros (except Jon Snow, whose lineage remains a secret).
“People talk about Grouty but, good heavens, the fan mail I get from all over the world because of Game of Thrones is enormous,” he told the Sunday Post. “It’s just grown and grown and once you’re hooked, that’s it.”
But while Peter Vaughan will be remembered in the short term for his role on Game of Thrones, it’s one of his 70s roles I will most treasure (and hope posterity will feel the same): his lead performance in 1972’s A Ghost Story for Christmas, A Warning to the Curious.
From 1971 to 1978 a ghost story was aired during Christmas week on the BBC. Directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, the first five years of A Ghost Story for Christmas were adaptations of ghost short stories by medievalist M.R. James.
A Warning to the Curious stars Vaughan as a recently unemployed, working-class man who decides to leave London and chase his lifelong dream of making archaeological history “to show people you didn’t need a string of letters after your name to be recognized.” After some detective work he uncovers a legendary crown, the last surviving of the three crowns of East Anglia, which legend says guards the coast and all of Britain against foreign invasion. The townsfolk, who believe in the power of the crown and have guarded it against treasure hunters (particularly in times of war), loom with eerie, Wicker Man intensity.
A Warning to the Curious is not only a fantastic and atmospheric ghost story, one of the highlights of the folk horror subgenre Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General), but it’s also a treasure for Anglophiles — every frame loaded with cold, desolate coasts, old books, church masonry and peculiarly English eccentrics. And Peter Vaughan anchors it all with the stolid, frayed dignity of a man finding step with himself after the world’s left him behind.
A Warning to the Curious isn’t available to stream, but it can be rented on Amazon. It’s not that hard to find.
Like many artists, great actors leave us bits of themselves. It’s more than their likeness that they leave us. They gift us fragments of other memories and other places. Peter Vaughan was part of the biggest TV phenomenon in history, but I’ll remember him as a man digging in a hillside, overcome with excitement at the discovery of treasure, unaware of the curse and consequence already in pursuit.
