Two gifted actors, and now the oldest member of the Dench clan, retired doctor Peter, is an accomplished watercolour painter too, as Stephen Lewis reports.

Dame Judi Dench has established herself as one of our greatest-ever actresses, and thanks to film roles such as Mrs Brown and Queen Elizabeth I, she's also taken Hollywood by storm.

She's not the only member of this York family to have made their mark on the theatrical world. Older brother Geoffrey - who, like Judi, trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama - was no mean stage actor himself, treading the boards as a member of rep in York before moving on to Stratford.

There is a third member of the Dench family, however, who turned his back on the theatrical world as a schoolboy.

Peter, now in his mid-seventies and still living in York, last 'trod the boards' as Caesar in a school production at St Peter's School in 1943.

"We did Caesar and Cleopatra," he said, in the beautifully-modulated tones of a natural Shakespearean actor. "Geoff (his younger brother) at the age of 14 was playing Cleopatra, I was at the other end of the school and I played Caesar. The Yorkshire Post the next morning ran the headline 'Caesar is Cleopatra's brother!' That was the last time!"

Theatre's loss was medicine's gain. After army service in the Far East, Peter followed in his father Reginald's footsteps and trained as a GP. For 40 years, until his retirement ten years ago, he was a family doctor in York, first with his father's old practice (which became the Priory Medical Group) and for the last ten years at Green Hammerton.

It wasn't only that newspaper headline, he concedes, that put him off a life on the stage.

Sitting in the conservatory of the spacious home in Rawcliffe that he shares with his French-born wife Daphne, he admitted: "I always said somebody has got to do the work!"

His admiration and affection for his younger sister - he calls her 'Jude' - is obvious.

Her success, he says, is 'marvellous'.

"It is unbelievable. Sometimes I just wonder what my father would have thought. My mother lived to see it happen, but to have gone on to this, it is unbelievable."

He says her star quality was first apparent while she was still studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

"After that I remember going to the Old Vic to see her perform. The Old Vic! It was the kind of thing you only dreamed about! Then her first night at Stratford a few years after that. That was magic.

"Now I've got blas. I think we all have. We just think Jude's at it again."

Some families seem to have all the luck. As if having two talented actors in the family wasn't enough, Peter himself is an accomplished amateur painter.

It was his formidable sister, he admits, who was responsible for him taking up painting.

"Jude started me," he said, before launching into one of the gentle anecdotes that colour his speech and give it, despite his rejection of the stage, a slightly theatrical feel.

"There was one time we were all up in the west of Scotland. We took two cars. We decided to go and have lunch. We started near Oban, went across a couple of ferries, had this marvellous lunch, and came out. My brother-in-law's car would not start. The only thing to do was to phone Oban to send out some help. "We did that, and then Jude said 'everybody paint!' So we all got out to the loch-side and were painting madly. When this chap got there hours later we all said 'send him back!'"

Things take her that way, he says - and her enthusiasm brushes off.

In his own case, it's a good thing that it did. Since his retirement ten years ago, painting has become 'a way of life', he says. He specialises in watercolours - finely-observed landscapes and street scenes in soft, pastel colours. In some of his French scenes - he and his wife often go there for their holidays - the sunlight seems almost to shine directly out of the paper. There's no doubt he's got a real talent.

In the true spirit of the English gentleman, he's oddly self-deprecating about it. "I like to send watercolour postcards from France and things, saving money on the postcards," he says, as if that's why he does it.

Staff at York Against Cancer, however, were quick to recognise the potential of the paintings.

It was a fellow member of his local painting group who encouraged him to do something with them. Her husband was involved with York Against Cancer.

"One day Primrose said 'you want to do something with those!'," he said. "I said 'Go on, don't be silly'." But she persisted, showed some of his paintings to the charity and now they're to bring out a set of four cards based on his paintings.

In his modest way it is something he's obviously not displeased about.

"I'm always looking for somewhere for them," he said. "It's like people with kittens, looking for good homes. But I would never have dreamed of it had it not been for Primrose."

The cards are available at £2.50 for a pack of eight from York Against Cancer's shop in North Moor Road, Huntington.