Grahame Clifford

For the film editor with a similar name, see Graeme Clifford.

Grahame Clifford (25 December 1905 – 26 January 1984), was an English singer and actor, known for comic parts in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and in character roles for the Royal Opera Company, Covent Garden.

In his early career Clifford played a wide range of roles in operas by composers from Handel to Vaughan Williams, and in mainstream repertory operas. He also acted in plays, produced theatre and taught. From 1939 to 1946 he was principal comedian of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company playing the comic leads in Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas.

After the war Clifford was a founding member of the Covent Garden Opera Company with which he played character roles in the German, French and Italian repertoire. In the last decades of his life he lived in New Zealand, where he performed, taught and directed until his retirement in 1981.

Clifford was born Clifford White in Burnley, Lancashire. He attended the Royal Manchester College of Music from 1925 to 1928, winning the Stocks Massey Scholarship and appeared in The Marriage of Figaro at the college in 1928. From 1928 to 1930, he studied at the Royal College of Music in London under a scholarship endowed by Ernest Palmer. Still appearing under his original name, he created the role of Frank Ford in Vaughan Williams's opera Sir John in Love in a college production in which his fellow-student Richard Watson played Falstaff. By the following year Clifford had adopted his stage name, under which he again appeared as Master Ford in an Oxford Festival production of Sir John in Love, conducted, as the premiere had been, by Malcolm Sargent.

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