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Peter Sallis has provided the distinctive voice of the cheese-loving inventor Wallace in all of Aardman's award-winning Wallace & Gromit animated shorts, beginning with 1989's Oscar-nominated A Grand Day Out, and continuing in the Academy Award-winning shorts: The Wrong Trousers, in 1993; and A Close Shave, in 1995. He also voiced Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit mini-shorts, collectively known as Cracking Contraptions.

Most recently, Sallis completed a cameo role in the upcoming film Colour Me Kubrick, starring John Malkovich. He also co-starred in the ITV drama Belonging, with Brenda Blethyn, and was a guest lead on the BBC series Doctors.

Sallis has been acting for more than 60 years, beginning as an amateur during a stint in the RAF during World War II. Immediately after the war, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and, in 1946, made his first professional appearance on the London stage in Richard Sheridan's The Scheming Lieutenant. He then toured in The School for Scandal, before returning to London's West End in The Three Sisters, with Ralph Richardson. Other West End appearances followed, including The Dark is Light Enough, with Edith Evans; Orsen Welles' production of Moby Dick; Look After Lulu, with Vivien Leigh; Rhinoceros, with Laurence Olivier; Two Stars for Comfort; A Shot in the Dark, with Judi Dench; Hal Prince's production of She Loves Me; Wait Until Dark, as Roat, opposite Honor Blackman; and Cabaret.

His additional theatre work includes the role of Mr. Bennett in Pride & Prejudice, at the Old Vic; Elijah Moshinsky's production of The Three Sisters, at Greenwich; and Ivanov and Much Ado About Nothing at The Strand. He also spent two seasons at the Lyric, Hammersmith. In the United States, Sallis has been seen on Broadway in Hal Prince's production of Baker Street, as Dr. Watson, and in John Osborn's Inadmissible Evidence, with Nicol Williamson.

On television, Sallis is perhaps best known for the role of Norman Clegg in the series Last of the Summer Wine, which is the BBC's longest-running program. He more recently portrayed his character's own father in the spinoff series First of the Summer Wine. Peter also played the title role in the BBC's production of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. His other television credits include Come Home Charlie and Face Them, Holby City, Rumpole of the Bailey, The New Statesman, The Bretts, Mountain Men, Strangers and Brothers, The Pallisers, Bel Ami, The Moonstone, Leave It to Charlie, She Loves Me, and installments of Armchair Theatre.

Sallis has also had roles in such films as Witness for the Prosecution, Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, Full Circle, The Incredible Sarah, Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970's Wuthering Heights, Inadmissible Evidence, Charlie Bubbles, The V.I.P.s, The Mouse on the Moon and The Curse of the Werewolf.

In addition, together with his wife, Elaine, Sallis has written plays for the radio, as well as his own adaptation of Boucicault's Old Heads and Young Hearts, which was presented at the Chichester Festival Theatre.