This is taken from The Guardian:

Richard Bebb
Prolific radio and stage actor with a penchant for collecting 78s

by Eric Shorter
Friday May 26, 2006

Richard Bebb, who has died at 79, was a stage, radio and television actor, and one of the world's foremost connoisseurs and collectors of things theatrical, especially 78rpm records. An expert on acting and actors' voices, he was as interested in the sound of 19th-century opera singers as in all aspects of modern theatre.
Over lunch at the Garrick club, London, he would bring as much authority to a discussion of the diverse qualities of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Donald Wolfit as Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Jean-Louis Barrault or Madeleine Renaud. He never affected superiority, though he was often dismissive of contradiction.

Of his unparalleled collection of old 78s, for which he often travelled to Europe or the US - "I am about to go to Paris and buy 5,000 records, 1,000 in Vienna and just one in Milan" - Bebb placed Henry Irving and Ellen Terry among his favourite voices after the discovery of four unknown private cylinder recordings. However, it was singers like Giovanni Martinelli, Maggie Teyte, Eva Turner and Reynaldo Hahn who gave him the greatest pleasure.

A fellow collector described their first meeting in a back room in Wardour Street, Soho, in 1957. "A beautifully modulated voice from behind my back said, 'Even if you're not an Elizabeth Schumann fan, that record is really charming and worth having.' I replied, 'Do you know Richard Bebb, the actor?', and turned to see a tall gentleman, youthful of countenance but obviously prematurely grey." The collector knew of Bebb's work in transferring 78s to LPs for the Delta Company, and they promptly formed a friendship that endured for half a century.

Bebb's wife Gwen Watford, whom he married in 1952, put on a brave, if resigned, face when their home was turned upside down to accommodate the invasion of yet another large batch of records: "She never understood that to have a passionate collector as a husband guarantees faithfulness," he said. "The greatest pleasure of my life was to see her in one of her plays 20 or 30 times and help her to polish it to perfection. My only aim was to make our acting better, and we were fiercely critical of each other in the most loving way." An integral part of Bebb's fascination with the stage was a relish for criticism.

Born Richard Bebb Williams, he was educated at Highgate school, north London, and took an English degree at Trinity College, Cambridge (1944-47). His first professional appearance, in 1947, came in Michael Redgrave's Macbeth (Aldwych). An engagement at Buxton with the repertory manager Anthony Hawtrey brought him roles in Strindberg's The Father, with Michael Redgrave, and George S Kaufman and Moss Hart's You Can't Take It With You.

In the latter, he played the lead opposite his wife to be - they first met in the back of Leslie Phillips' car. Within a fortnight, "I knew I wanted to marry her. She never had a head for drink, and one evening she had two - I actually proposed to her while she was throwing up in the toilet!"

Bebb became most widely known for his work in radio plays, voice-overs and advertisements. In 1954, he and Richard Burton were the second and first voices respectively in the original radio production of Under Milk Wood, still available on CD; and in 2003 he narrated the 12-CD set Forgotten Voices of the Great War. Six weeks before his death, he completed a recording of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, due for release later this year.

Bebb's voice - heard in more than 1,000 broadcast plays - found a niche on television in Agatha Christie's Poirot, in various newsreading capacities. In the decades following his TV debut in 1951, as Octavius to Walter Hudd's Julius Caesar, he was seen in dramas such as Dangerman, Softly, Softly, Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, The Barchester Chronicles and Miss Marple. He was often cast in roles of authority - doctors, chief constables, knights and judges.

His wife died in 1994, and he is survived by two sons.

· Richard Bebb Williams, actor and collector, born January 12 1927; died April 12 2006