Richard Goolden

Richard Percy Herbert Goolden (23 February 1895 – 18 June 1981) was a British actor, most famous for his portrayal of Mole from Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows in A A Milne's stage adaptation, Toad of Toad Hall

Goolden took up the stage after serving in the army in the First World War. From the start of his career he was cast in character parts, usually elderly. He played more than 500 roles in a career that lasted more than fifty years, and embraced the classics, farce, opera bouffe, radio, films and television. He first played Mole in 1930 and took the part in numerous revivals until his retirement in 1980. He created roles in new plays by Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard, and, in his last year, in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Goolden was born in London, the son of a barrister, Percy Pugh Goolden Goolden (sic), and his wife Margarida, née da Costa Ricci. He was educated at Charterhouse, where his impersonation of the headmaster delighted the headmaster's wife and everybody except possibly the headmaster, who counselled him to "aim at good taste in the use of his gifts". From Charterhouse he went up to New College, Oxford; his university career was interrupted by the First World War. From 1915 to 1918 he was a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France (serving in the same unit as Ralph Vaughan Williams), ending the war as acting unpaid lance corporal. Returning to Oxford at the end of the war he took an honours degree in French literature in 1923. He was appointed secretary of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with whom he visited Scandinavia, appearing in Galsworthy's Loyalties and A A Milne's Mr Pim Passes By. He counted the role of Mr Pim as one of his three favourites, together with Mole in Toad of Toad Hall and the Fool in King Lear. He appeared as Dolon in Cyril Bailey's production (in the original Greek) of the Euripides tragedy Rhesus.

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