ES-7295E Brian Norman Roger Rix, Baron Rix , CBE , DL (27 January 1924 – 20 August 2016) was an English actor-manager, who produced a record-breaking sequence of long-running farces on the London stage, including Dry Rot , Simple Spymen and One for the Pot . His one-night TV shows made him the joint-highest paid star on the BBC. He often worked with his wife Elspet Gray and sister Sheila Mercier , who became the matriarch in Emmerdale Farm . After his first child was born with Down syndrome , Rix became a campaigner for disability causes, among others. He entered the House of Lords as a crossbencher in 1992 and was president of Mencap from 1998 until his death. 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 company Robert Rix in Hull , founded by his grandfather. Rix had an interest in cricket and only wished to play for Yorkshire in his childhood. He did play for Hull Cricket Club when he was 16 (and after the war for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the Stage and the Lord's Taverners ). When he was being educated at Bootham School ,[1] York, his ambitions changed. His elder sister Sheila became an actress during his school days, and Rix himself 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 became known, played Annie Sugden for more than 20 years in the Yorkshire TV soap opera Emmerdale Farm having worked regularly with her brother in the Whitehall farces in the 1950s and 1960s. Rix became a professional actor when he was 18, on deferment from service with the Royal Air Force , with Donald Wolfit 's Shakespeare Company. After only four months as a professional actor, he played Sebastian in Twelfth Night at the St James's Theatre in London. His deferment was extended and he gained his first weekly repertory experience with the White Rose Players at the opera house in Harrogate . From there he went into the Royal Air Force, eventually ending up as a volunteer Bevin Boy working down the coal mines near Doncaster . After the war, Rix returned to the stage, forming his own theatre company in 1947 as an actor-manager, a career he was to pursue for the next 30 years. He ran repertory companies at Ilkley , Bridlington and Margate , and while at Bridlington, in 1949, he found the play that was to bring him notice – Reluctant Heroes , later adapted for a film version . In the same year, he became engaged to Elspet Gray , an actress in his company, and six months later they married. They were together, domestically and professionally, for 64 years, until her death in February 2013, appearing alongside each other in many of the television farces , a radio series and three of the theatre productions. In 1950 the newly-weds toured together with Reluctant Heroes until Rix managed to persuade the Whitehall Theatre management that this army farce was the ideal play to follow the long-running Worm's Eye View . It was a happy choice, for Rix's productions ran there for the next 16 years, before he moved to the Garrick Theatre , breaking many West End records in the process. His farces for BBC Television also began at the Whitehall, increasing Rix and Gray's profile as well as that of the Whitehall Theatre. During the next 18 years, Rix presented more than 90 one-night-only television farces on the BBC. These were often presented at Christmas or on other bank holidays [3] with viewing figures often reaching 15 million. In the early 1960s, Rix was the highest-paid actor (along with Robert Morley ) to appear on BBC Television. Alongside the regulars from his theatre company, Rix appeared in these TV productions with such names as Dora Bryan , Joan Sims , Ian Carmichael , John Le Mesurier , Patrick Cargill , Fabia Drake , Sheila Hancock , Warren Mitchell , Thora Hird and Francis Matthews . Only a handful of the televised farces remain in the BBC archive, however. Rix also appeared in 11 films and though he felt these were less suited to his talents as a farceur, these also met with some box-office success.