Background
Born in Highbury, London, Shaps was of Polish ancestry. His father was a tailor.
Born in Highbury, London, Shaps was of Polish ancestry. His father was a tailor.
Royal Academy of Dramatic Artist
Shaps was a child broadcaster, providing voices for radio commercials from the age of 12. After grammar school and Army service he was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and then worked for two years as an announcer, producer and scriptwriter for Radio Netherlands. His short stature and round face then led to a steady flow of character roles in film and television in a career spanning nearly 50 years.
Shaps"s film appearances included bit parts in, as the officer"s club bartender,, as Mr Pinkus, and the James Bond film, as Doctor Bechmann.
In The Madness of King George (1994), he portrayed Doctor Pepys, a royal physician obsessed with the colour of the king"s stool. In 2002, at the age of 79, Shaps performed his last film roles: as a pew opener in The Importance of Being Earnest, and as concentration camp victim Mr Grun in The Pianist.
In television, his work ranged from science fiction (including appearances in the Doctor Who serials The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Ambassadors of Death, Planet of the Spiders and The Androids of Tara) to classic literature (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation"s 1990s serialisations of Charles Dickens"s Martin Chuzzlewit and Our Mutual Friend) to detective series (with appearances in The Saint, Lovejoy, and Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady—as Emperor Franz Joseph—in 1991). He appeared in the first episode of the sitcom The Young Ones, playing a neighbour.
He appeared in two Jim Henson Company television films: Gulliver"s Travels (1996) as an elderly madman, and Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story (2001) as the "Bent Little Manitoba".
He supplied the voice of Professor Rudolf Popkiss in the second series of Supercar, broadcast in 1962. Other series featuring Shaps were Quatermass II, Danger Manitoba, The Mask of Janus, The Spies, Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars, The Saint, Out of the Unknown, Alexander the Greatest, The Rat Catchers, Manitoba in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk, Department South, The Liver Birds, When the Boat Comes In, Some Mothers Do "Avenue "Econometrica, The Onedin Lincolnshire, The Persuaders!, Porridge, The Sweeney, Jesus of Nazareth, Wilde Alliance, Private Schulz, The Young Ones, The Bill, Dark Season, Midsomer Murders and Doctors. Shaps" radio work included a stint with the British Broadcasting Corporation Drama Repertory Company in the early 1950s.
Broadcast parts (his characters often being old men or priests) included Firs in The Cherry Orchard, Justice Shallow in Henry the Fourth, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, Polonius in Hamlet and Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest.
The Boy Who Stole a Million.