Ronald William George Barker AKA Ronnie Barker

Ronnie Barker was born in Bedford in Bedfordshire. His family moved to Oxford. When Ronnie Barker was 2 years old. He started writing plays for his family and sometimes sat in the audience of The Oxford Playhouse, his local theatre. Ronnie Barker attended the City of Oxford High School and at sixteen he left and took a job at a bank. He wrote to the Aylesbury theatre in 1948 and his theatre career began. Ronnie Barker then went on to join the Playhouse Theatre in Oxford. He first appeared there, in Ben Travers's A Cuckoo in the Nest and in a number of other roles. Ronnie Barker started off in comedy in the hit sitcom hark at Barker 1969 - 1970. He later moved onto The Two ronnie's with Ronnie Corbett. His first radio appearance was in 1956 he went on to play a lot of minor characters in The Navy Lark, a navy based sit-com on the BBC Light Programme (still available on tape and rerun on BBC 7). He later returned to radio in the BBC Radio 4 sketch show Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead. He acted in the films Father Came Too! and The Bargee. On television, he wrote and performed many satirical skits in The Frost Report, notably a series of trios which he performed with Ronnie Corbett and John Cleese. From 1961 to 1963, he starred in the three series of Faces of Jim. He starred with David Jason as a bumbling aristocrat in the sitcom Hark at Barker. Both he and David Jason are widely recognised as having excellent comic timing and delivery, which accounts for their enduring popularity. Jason appeared in several episodes of Porridge, and co-starred as Granville, the errand boy and nephew of Barker's stuttering shopkeeper Arkwright in the sitcom Open All Hours, written by Roy Clarke. Both Porridge and Open All Hours originated as part of the Seven of One series.

Ronnie Barker married Joy Tubb in 1957 and they had three children: two sons, the actors Adam (1967 and Larry (1960) and one daughter, the actress Charlotte Barker (1963). He retired to Dean, a hamlet near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire to run an antiques shop in late 1987. He died in a local hospital from heart failure on Monday 3 October 2005, aged 76, with his wife by his side. His catchphrase ending from The Two Ronnies provided the perfect inscription on his gravestone: "Goodnight From Him."