Actor

Trained at the Webber-Douglas School in London. Awarded Douglas cup upon graduation. Five years in British repertory companies. Playing amongst other things: Saint Peter, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, A cigar-smoking American Air Force Colonel (at age 21) and the front end of a cow in Jack and the Beanstalk. Oh yes, and plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Tennessee Williams and Jean Anouilh.

After three years with the Oldham Rep. Co., doing a show every week, I moved to Sheffield, a bi-weekly Company and didn't know what to do with the second week of rehearsal. Found out eventually.

Made my name initially as a revue performer in Look Who's Here, a kind of New Faces entertainment at the Fortune Theatre in London and in One to Another… the first absurdist revue to hit the West End, featured in sketches by Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco, amongst others.

Some time later I found myself on the same stage as Mr. Pinter playing the 'victim' Stanley in his play The Birthday Party.

Played a psychopath in The Last Ally at the Lyric Hammersmith and Ken Tynan said of my performance: "One of the most authentic and unsentimental portraits of a nut case I have ever seen in the theatre." And if you don't know who Mr. Tynan was… shame on you.

Shortly after took over the part of Littlechap in Stop the World I Want To Get Off at the Queen's Theatre and subsequently starred in the Warner Bros. movie.

Innumerable television plays, series and variety shows. Innumerable because I myself have forgotten how many. One of them however was A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which I played Puck to Benny Hill's Bottom. No, no, that's the name of the character.

A chance to replace Tommy Steele in the lead role of the 1965 Broadway production of Half a Sixpence took me to the United States. My next turn on Broadway was in 1973, in a leading role in No Sex Please, We're British — a play that didn't last long but gave me a chance to use everything in my comedic bag of tricks.

Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times: "Tony Tanner, in the leading role of the absurd friend, pulls faces with vigor, whines in a nasal, distorted and effeminate cockney, has a funny trick trying to get from a chair while loaded down with a pile of books, and jumps through windows with a pleasing disregard for personal safety."