Stardom
In 1968 Lowe was cast in his best remembered role, as Captain George Mainwaring in the BBC sitcom Dad's Army (1968–77). His colleagues on the show later remarked that the role resembled Lowe himself, pompous and bumbling; Lowe had a clause written into his contract specifying that he would never have to lose his trousers. He also successfully played Mainwaring's drunken brother Barry Mainwaring in the 1975 Christmas episode "My Brother and I". Lowe and his character also surfaced in a radio version of Dad's Army, a stage play and a feature length film released in 1971.
While Dad's Army was not in production, Lowe appeared in plays at the National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. In 1968 Lowe was invited by Laurence Olivier to act at the National Theatre at the Old Vic and appeared in Somerset Maugham's Home and Beauty in 1968 and later The Tempest in 1974 with John Gielgud.
He also had prominent parts in several films directed by Lindsay Anderson, films including if.... (1968) and multiple roles in O Lucky Man! (1973). His other film roles during this period included Spike Milligan's surreal The Bed Sitting Room (1969), in which he mutates into a parrot, a drunken butler in The Ruling Class (1972) with Peter O'Toole, and Theatre of Blood (1973), a horror film starring Vincent Price, with Lowe as one of the critics murdered by the deranged actor played by Price.
On television he appeared as a guest performer on The Morecambe and Wise Show (1977), alongside Richard Briers in a series of Ben Travers farces for the BBC, as the pompous Dr Maxwell in the ITV comedy Doctor at Large (1971), and as Redvers Bodkin, a snooty, old-fashioned butler in the short-lived sitcom The Last of the Baskets (1971–72).
Between 1971 and 1973 Lowe joined Dad's Army colleague Ian Lavender on the BBC radio comedy Parsley Sidings, and played Mr Micawber in a BBC television serial of David Copperfield (1974). He employed a multitude of voices on the BBC animated television series Mr. Men (1974), in which he was the narrator in addition to voicing all the characters.
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