John Leddy has played hundreds of parts and roles in his long acting career, especially on stage and television. But he owed his greatest fame to his weekly appearance as Koos Dobbelsteen in the TV series Say aaa…, the amicable husband of Mien, the maid in the Van der Ploeg family of doctors. For twelve years he played that role, which was not even a leading role, but so believable that he gradually became one of the most popular characters in the series.
Leddy remained active as an actor and director until old age, in a large number of diverse TV and theater productions. He passed away on Sunday, aged 92.
John Leddy made his professional debut in 1956 with the then Rotterdams Toneel, after he had graduated from the Amsterdam drama school earlier that year. Two years later he switched to the Eindhoven company Ensemble, where he mainly played smaller roles. The fact that he nevertheless stayed there for ten years had to do with the fact that Ensemble had fixed agreements with the broadcasters at the time to re-enact various theater performances in the TV studio and to broadcast them (usually live). This is how Leddy discovered that he actually preferred the concentration in such a studio to the raising of his voice in a theater hall. “I feel comfortable with cameras,” he noted.
Television Ring
From the 1970s, Leddy worked as a freelance actor with progressive theater groups such as Proloog, DAT and Sater, and in an endless series of TV productions. “I am always asked for farmers, fishermen or construction workers,” he said with some self-mockery in the Leeuwarder Courant. “That must have something to do with that head of mine.” He gained his first great fame in 1971 with the much-watched TV series The little truth, as Jan Engelmoer, the cheated husband of Marleen Spaargaren, played surprisingly sincerely by Willeke Alberti. Although he himself came from The Hague, he created a completely authentic Amsterdammer – just like Koos Dobbelsteen, later.
Say aaa… played from early 1981 to early 1993, won the Televizier-Ring in 1984 as the favorite TV program of millions of viewers and reached a total of 212 episodes. Leddy was always the handyman, dressed in a checkered shirt, who spoke soothing words when tempers in the Van der Ploeg house ran too high. But he did not wish to be identified with Koos Dobbelsteen forever. In 1985, for example, he made a theater tour with a solo performance about the fifteenth-century humanist scholar Rudolf Agricola. And in the following season he starred in a farce by John Lanting, a former drama school classmate. “I like those contrasts in my profession,” he said AD know, “as long as it has, in my opinion, quality.”
Leddy therefore refused to participate in the two theater versions of Say aaa… which were box office successes in 2003 and 2007. And he was also missing from a disappointing TV sequel in 2009. “I am a man who wants to keep doing different things,” he said in The Telegraph. “Dice really remains a passed station.”