Letters: the stylish John Moffatt

Perry Pontac writes: After retiring from the stage in the late 1980s, John Moffatt (obituary , 17 September) largely concentrated on BBC radio drama work. He was incomparable. He appeared in eight of my radio comedies, all of which I wrote with him in mind and to which he brought the full range of his subtle and elegant powers; always true to the text, yet making the characters seem far richer and the jokes far funnier than they really were. An actor's actor no doubt, but a playwright's too. Michael Billington writes: I'd like to add a line or two to Michael Coveney's excellent obituary of that superbly stylish actor, John Moffatt: so stylish was Moffatt that even when he dried mid-number on the first night of Cowardy Custard, he carried it off with dapper aplomb. But he was also, in private, a very funny man. I remember how, at a lunch party thrown by the late Jonathan Cecil and his wife Anna, John kept us royally entertained with his impersonation of the drag-artist, Mrs Shufflewick. He also told one of my favourite theatrical stories. The famously flamboyant Robert Atkins was spotted coming out of a cinema showing Treasure Island. He claimed he had been drawn to it by Robert Newton's Long John Silver. According to Moffatt, when asked what he thought of that eye-rolling, screen-hogging performance, Atkins, with a distinctive flutter of his left hand, cried: "Simply threw it away! Threw it away!" • John Moffatt singing Noël Coward's Mad Dogs and Englishmen