Sebastian Cabot

Bagheera has one job in The Jungle Book (1967): get the boy to the man-village. Nobody else in the jungle has the slightest interest in helping. Every mile or so a bear or a snake or a column of elephants comes out of the undergrowth and the plot stops for a number, and Cabot's panther waits it out like a man who has missed one train and can see the next one leaving. He is not the reason to watch the film. Phil Harris and George Sanders are. But someone has to sound as if the errand matters, or the songs are only songs, and that someone is Cabot.

That was his trade for forty years. He began in uncredited bits in British films from 1935, took a first credit in Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936), and learned the work in repertory rather than at any school, having left school at fourteen. In the 1950s he went to America, where the beard and the vowels got him noticed in Ivanhoe (1952) and Kismet (1955), and then a part as Dr Philip Hilyer in George Pal's The Time Machine (1960). Television did the rest: Dr Carl Hyatt in Checkmate (1960–62), and five years as Giles French, the butler in Family Affair (1966–71), which is still the part most people hear when his name comes up.

He knew precisely what he was for. "I'm the bounce board for the comedy. I never tell jokes or take pratfalls. I'm always dignified," he said of the French role, and it is as honest a description of a character actor's job as we have read. Comedy needs a hard surface to hit. Cabot supplied one and never let you catch him waiting for the laugh. Disney's animators used that quality four times over: Sir Ector and the narrator in The Sword in the Stone (1963), Bagheera, and the narrator of the Winnie the Pooh shorts, finishing with The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), his last film.

We will own one moment. When Mowgli goes off with the bear yet again and Bagheera's exasperation comes through, there is a note under it we did not expect to be moved by, and were: he is the only creature in the film who is frightened for the child, and Cabot plays that instead of the joke. It is the difference between a straight man and a stooge.

The price of being that dependable is the only reservation anyone has ever raised against him. After 1971 he was Mr French wherever he turned up, and he does not seem to have minded. Start with The Jungle Book, where he has the hardest job in the picture and gets no song for it. Then try the Pooh films and notice how much of their calm is his.