Harry Landis, actor who played a barber in EastEnders and the ghastly Mr Morris in Friday Night Dinner – obituary
16.09.2022 - 21:52
/ msn.com
Frances Cuka). With his toothbrush moustache, hideous conversational gambits (“Guess how many heart attacks I’ve had!”), obsession with cleanliness (“I’m very hygienical,” he says, wiping his dirty hands on the curtains) and propensity for violence, Mr Morris turns out to be the Goodman family’s worst nightmare. In a particularly toe-curling scene Morris gets the Goodman sons Jonny and Adam to buy him condoms, but objects: “Not those, they’re too loose.
”Landis’s character reappeared in the third series when, to the family’s horror, his wife having died, he and Grandma become engaged, last featuring in the cliffhanger final episode “The Big Day” in July 2014, when, as the rabbi asks the couple to exchange vows, Grandma saves the day by staging a collapse. An only child, Harry Landis was a genuine Eastender, born in Stepney on November 25 1931. His father died when he was a baby and he was brought up by his widowed mother in abject poverty.
He recalled taking refuge in her lap when Blackshirts chanting “Get rid of the Yids! Get rid of the Yids!” threw a brick through their window. In a 1996 interview with the Jewish Chronicle he described queuing in the 1930s for a soup and bread at a soup kitchen run by Food for the Jewish Poor: “My mother said she had two children to get a bit more food in that saucepan. One day, they called me in, aged about six, and asked: ‘Have you got a sister?’ I sussed what my mother had told them.
I said: ‘Yes. ’ They asked: ‘What’s her name?’ And from nowhere came: ‘Rosy. ’ My mother kissed me because I didn’t give anything away.
. . ”The experience, he said, had made him a lifelong socialist with an everlasting dislike of pre-welfare state, do-gooding “pompous Jews”.