Anthony Head, the British actor who rose from the smooth 1980s pitchman for Nescafe Gold Blend instant coffee to become a mainstay performer on influential television shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Ted Lasso,” has died. He was 72.

The cause was “complications due to pneumonia,” his daughters, actresses Emily Head and Daisy Head, said in a statement released to the BBC on Friday. The statement did not say where or when he died.

Head’s breakout came when he was cast as Rupert Giles in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the unexpected supernatural hit starring Sarah Michelle Gellar that ran from 1997 to 2003.

In the show, Giles was the fussy librarian at Sunnydale High School. But his real job was as Buffy’s “watcher,” appointed by a mysterious council to guide the young vampire slayer.

While auditioning for “Buffy,” Head pitched playing the role with the persona of Hugh Grant’s character in “Four Weddings and

a Funeral,” Prince Charles or as Alan Rickman “in his more decisive moments,” Head said in a 2001 interview with The Evening Standard. Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, liked all of the ideas – so Giles became a combination of the three.

The nebbishy charm of the performance endered Head to audiences.

“It opened the door to work internationally,” Head told he British tabloid Metro in 2013.

The coming decades would allow Head to show a wide range of performig abilities. That included a Tony Blair-inspired prime minister on the comedy series “Little Britain.”

Additional roles included Uther Pendragon on “Merlin,” David Wheele in the science fiction show “Dominion,” and Lord Sheffield on an episode of “Bridgerton.”

The most high-profile recent role came when he landed a part on “Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV comedy that won legions of fans during the height of the pandemic. Head played the recurring character of Rupert Mannion, the smarmy former owner of AFC Richmond, who lost

Head recalled to The Guarding in 2021, “was fascinating.”

This is partly what led Head to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. One of his most formative experiences, he said, was seeing Tim Curry in the musical “The Rocky Horror Show” while in drama school as a teenager. He told The Guardian that it “ignited something in my core.”

Early in his career, Head starred in a West End Revival of the musical “Godspell” in 1978, which led to bit parts in television shows.

But in the mid-1980s, Head won fans for several years as the centerpiece of a campaign by instant coffee brand Nescafe, alongside actress Sharon Maughan.

His brother is actor Murray Head, who played Bob Elkin in the 1971 Oscar-nominated film “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”

Head’s longtime partner, Sarah Fiser, an animal welfare activist, died last year. Both of their daughters, Emily Head and Daisy Head, are also actors. In the 2008 miniseries “The Invisibles,” Head performed alongside Emiy, his eldest daughter.

the team to his ex-wife in a divorce.

“He’s a particularly unpleasant character and you know where he’s coming from,” Head told The Guardian in 2021. “To make somebody believable, you have to see their point of view. You don’t need to like them, but you have to be on board with what’s driving them.”

Anthony Stewart Head was born Feb. 20, 1954, in London. His mother, Helen Shingler, was best known for portraying Madame Maigret in the BBC detective series “Maigret” from 1960 to 1963. His father, Seafield Head, was a documentary filmaker.

“People think that must have made it easier for me to become an actor, but actually, that’s nonsense,” Head told The Guardian in 206. “My mother said, ‘Well, if you must.’ And my father said I needed to have a second string to my bow, so if I didn’t suceed at acting, I’d have something else I coud do. Bless his heart, he was fairly controlling.”

His father did hire him to be an assistant editor on some projects as a teenager. Working cutting rooms,