Anthony Head, best known as Giles in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, has died at age 72. The actor, who began performing in 1978, was more recently seen as a regular in Bill Lawrence’s soccer comedy Ted Lasso, and last appeared in 2024’s Amazon Prime movie Upgraded. His daughters released a statement saying that “it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father.”
Anthony Stewart Head will unquestionably be best remembered for his role in the late ’90s/early ’00s Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series in which he played the endlessly patient and good-natured school librarian Giles, secretly training Buffy and looking after the Scooby Gang throughout their teenage years. However, his long career stretches both back and forward from that show. Beginning as a regular TV actor on British shows in the 1970s and ’80s, he first achieved break-out fame in the UK with a long-running series of commercials for Nescafe Gold Blend instant coffee. It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t there quite what a phenomenon those ads were, in which Head and Sharon Maughan played a will-they-won’t-they couple in what effectively became a seven-year-long soap opera doled out in 30-second chunks.
Head also had a stint playing Frank N. Furter in the Rocky Horror Show in the early ’90s, and in 1997 began six years of working on Buffy, before returning to the UK and primarily playing more television roles, perhaps most notably as King Uther Pendragon in the BBC’s Merlin.
Removes glasses, pinches bridge of nose
Anthony Head lived in Bath in the UK, as did I, and it was commonplace to see the actor walking in town. For those who knew him via Buffy, it would always be quite the head-turning surprise to learn that his natural accent was not Giles’ soft-spoken clipped poshness, but rather the far more cockney Lahhh-dahn tones of a man who was indeed born in Camden Town, London. I’m also delighted to be able to tell you that a friend once saw him shopping in the upmarket grocery store Waitrose while wearing a cape.
His daughters released a statement explaining that their father had “passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family.” It continues,
It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many.
We know how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues, and fans of the shows he was in—he loved his job very much, and he always considered himself incredibly lucky, to have been able to work alongside such exceptionally talented people, in such wonderful productions, across a career that spanned several decades.
RIP.