When Mr Peter’s Confessions had its world premiere at the Almeida, Miller wanted Mitchell to play the lead. He is now having his second stab at Solomon Gregory, a Methuselah-like furniture dealer who finds himself at the centre of another family’s private war in The Price. He has played Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman no fewer than four times, twice here, twice in Australia. It’s the Warren Misell in him, you suspect, that makes Mitchell Arthur Miller’s favourite British actor. So I went back to Mitchell.” ( Below, with Dandy Nichols as Alf's long-suffering wife Else.) Then I was doing cabaret and we were introduced by a gorgeous lady in rhyming couplets and she couldn’t find a rhyme for Misell. “They said, ‘You can’t have a name like that, nobody’s ever going to write in their request to Warren Misell.’ So I changed it to Mitchell. “Then I went to Radio Luxembourg as a disc jockey as a relief for Pete Murray. “The little work I had, they never pronounced it right, they never spelt it right,” he says. WOULD WARREN MITCHELL be taken more seriously as an actor if he’d kept his original name? The name his grandparents brought over from the Russian shtetl nearly 100 years ago was Misell (pronounced my-zell). He was Miller’s favourite British actor, and won Olivier Awards in 1979 for Death of a Salesman and 2004 for The Price. But, as I discovered when interviewing Mitchell in 2002 on the eve of his playing the lead in Arthur Miller’s The Price, there was much more to him than the Cockney dock-worker.

Death of a salesman bbc