British Actors Archives - Page 96 of 135

Jack Watson

Jack Watson obituary in “The Independent” in 1999

The great character actor Jack Watson was born in Cambridgeshire in 1915. He began his career on radio in such BBC shows as “Nancock’s Half Hour” and “The Clitheroe Kid”. His film career did not begin until he was 45 when he made “Peeping Tom” for Michael Powell in 1960. He then became a very familiar face on film in such movies as “Konga”, “The Queen’s Guard”, “On the Beat”, “This Sporting Life”, “The Idol” with Jennifer Jones”, “Tobruk”in 1967 , which was made in Hollywood as was “The Devil’s Brigade” with William Holden. Back in Britain he made the excellent “The Strange Affair” with Michael York. He died in 1999.

“The Independent” obituary:THE CAREER of the tall and rugged actor Jack Watson embraced the music hall, radio, television and films. The older generation will recall him as part of a music-hall double act with his father Nosmo King, or as a radio comic and monologuist on such shows as Navy Mixture and Take It From Here. Coronation Street viewers will remember him as the man who finally won Elsie Tanner for keeps, and on the screen he was notable for playing tough and gruff men of action in such films as The Wild Geese and The Sea Wolves

“I shall never be a great actor,” he once stated, but his imposing physical prescence – he was an outdoor sports fanatic in real life and represented England in springboard diving championships – and his commitment to a role, often that of a villain or a serviceman, were convincing enough to earn him the offer of a Hollywood contract, which he refused. “The word `star’ does not mean a thing to me,” he said. “I prefer to think of myself as a dedicated human being.”

Watson was born in 1921 in Thorney, near Peterborough. His father Vernon Watson was a comedian who, wanting a more distinctive name, had become Nosmo King after he noticed a “No Smoking” sign in a theatre corridor. His mother, Barbara Hughes, was a Gaiety Girl and young Jack was introduced to the world of music halls at an early age. When he was 16, he was performing a double act on the variety stage with his father, playing a precocious teenager named Hubert Hubert. Their act was seen by cinemagoers in several Pathe Pictorial shorts between 1935 and 1939.

With the outbreak of the Second World War the super-fit Jack Watson became a physical training instructor in the Navy and appeared on the radio variety show Navy Mixture, displaying a flair for mimicking a range of accents. At war’s end he continued to do a solo act both in variety and on the radio. He made his feature film debut with a small role in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951) but had his first prominent role in Michael Powell’s controversial thriller Peeping Tom (1960), playing the Chief Inspector investigating a series of brutal killings.

In the horror film Konga (1961) he was again a police inspector and delivered the film’s most memorable line when, after receiving a phone call, he informs his assistants, “There’s a huge monster gorilla that’s constantly growing to outlandish proportions loose in the streets.” But his acting career really took off when later in 1961 he was cast in Coronation Street as Petty Officer Bill Gregory, who had an affair with Elsie Tanner (Pat Phoenix) which she broke off when she discovered he was married.

His character was to appear sporadically in the series over the next 23 years. Gregory returned when, his wife having died, he proposed to Elsie, but she instead married Alan Howard. In 1983 Gregory returned again to find Elsie now single and still living on the Street, and this time he persuaded her to go off with him to run a wine bar in the Algarve. (The couple’s final appearance on the show was on 4 January 1984.)

Watson also played the title role in a nine-part television adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s adventure story Redgauntlet (1970), and in a grittily realistic version of the Arthurian legends, Arthur of the Britons (1972- 73), he was Lludd, companion to Arthur (Oliver Tobias). Other television series in which Watson appeared included Z Cars, Upstairs Downstairs, All Creatures Great and Small, Minder, Casualty and Heartbeat. He won particular praise for his skilful portrayal of the flawed union official pretending to be a double agent in the mystery thriller Edge of Darkness (1985), written by Troy Kennedy Martin as a tribute to film noir and recipient of nine Bafta Award nominations.

Notable films in which he acted included Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1962), in which he was believable as the captain of a Rugby League team joined by an ex-miner, Richard Harris, and The Hill (1965), in which he was one of four soldiers who witness a murder committed by one of the officers at a military prison in the Middle East where they are serving time. He was also in the war films Tobruk (1966) and The Devil’s Brigade (1968) and three popular adventure yarns directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and co-starring Roger Moore, The Wild Geese (1977), North Sea Hijack (1979) and The Sea Wolves (1980).

I first met Jack Watson in 1970 when a new producer brought him in to act as chairman to my nostalgic radio panel game Sounds Familiar, writes Denis Gifford. He replaced Barry Took, who had hosted the first 100 or so shows. Watson, not yet the fine film actor he was to become, was himself a nostalgic figure from my younger days as a fan of the variety stage.

Unfortunately, right from the very first programme he seemed uncomfortable and ill at ease. He was incapable of any of the impromptu chit-chat that relaxed the ever-changing team of panellists. I put this down to early nervousness, but throughout the several series he compered he never improved one jot.

Was Watson perhaps the victim of his father’s strict training? He was certainly a fair enough straight man in the days when, as “Hubert”, he would interrupt his fancy-dressed blackface father with shouted demands from the orchestra pit, in the guise of the theatre manager. I remembered his earlier radio performances as a solo artist when, during the Second World War, as Petty Officer Jack Watson, he compered Navy Mixture. In this programme, which ran weekly from 1943, Watson revealed a hitherto unsuspected talent as an impressionist.

I began to write brief impressions into my linking scripts for Sounds Familiar, and they saved the day, especially when I arranged for a surprise guest to come in from Watson’s own past; Jimmy Clitheroe, for instance. In 1953 Watson had taken over as compere of Blackpool Night and little Jimmy played the regular character of a bad boy who caused trouble for Watson. When Jimmy came on our show, he too proved to be an awkward customer. He refused to appear as his adult self and insisted on playing his radio role of a 10-year-old kid. So we used one of his scripts from Blackpool Night which featured comedy dialogue with Watson.

Effects: Window smashing.

Jimmy: I smashed the cricket ball right through your window. You didn’t catch it did you?

Jack: No.

Jimmy: Oh good, I’m not out then!

This won laughter and applause, so, later in the series, when Nan Kenway, partner of the then ageing Douglas Young, popped up as our surprise guest, we arranged for her to bring along one of their old double-act scripts. She played the ancient Mrs Yatton and Watson did his impression of Douglas Young as the food-conscious pensioner, Mr Grice. The scene is the bar of The Startled Hare.

Nan: We rode on the tailboard of the van. There wasn’t much room on it.

Jack: Ah, I likes that.

Nan: Likes what?

Jack: Mushroom omelette! Very tasty, very sweet!

This nugget of nostalgia won even bigger laughter and applause than Kenway and Young ever managed.

Jack Watson, actor: born Thorney, Cambridgeshire 15 May 1921; married (one son, two daughters); died Bath 4 July 1999.

The above “Independent” obituary can be accessed online here.

Article on Jack Watson in “Tina Aumont’s Eyes” website:

Towering, stocky and serious looking, British character actor Jack Watson was a familiar face on screen for over forty years. He cropped up in comedy, thrillers and horror, but would mostly be remembered for his co-starring roles in a handful of memorable war and adventure pictures, which suited his physique perfectly.

Born Hubert Watson in Cambridge, on May 15th 1915, to showbiz parents (his music-hall comedian father Vernon went by the name ‘Nosmo King’ – get it?), Watson began in the Navy as a physical training instructor. Inheriting his father’s talents, Jack found work on BBC radio in such popular programmes as ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ and ‘Take it from Here’. Early television parts came when he had villainous roles in popular serials ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ and ‘Z-Cars’, series in which he would later return for further appearances.

Watson’s first notable film role was as a police inspector in Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’, after which he played Len Miller, the captain of Richard Harris’s rugby team, in Lindsay Anderson’s excellent drama ‘This Sporting Life’ (’63). Around this time, I fondly remember Jack from his physical role as the no-nonsense Jock McGrath, in Sidney Lumet’s brilliant but rather neglected military drama ‘The Hill’ (’65), with Sean Connery and Harry Andrews. Next, he was in John Frankenheimer’s realistic racing pic; ‘Grand Prix’ (’66), playing British team manager Jeff Jordan. After playing a sergeant major in the Rock Hudson starrer ‘Tobruk’ (’67), Watson had a decent role as Quince, a corrupt police officer, in ‘The Strange Affair’ (’68), with Michael York. Another military part followed when he was cast as one of William Holden’s rag-tag group in ‘The Devil’s Brigade’ (’68), a watchable but poor man’s ‘Dirty Dozen’.

A brief bit in the saucy Marty Feldman comedy ‘Every Home Should Have One’ (’70) was followed by the oft-filmed Scottish adventure ‘Kidnapped’ (’71), with Michael Caine and Trevor Howard. Another good role that year came in the Scottish P.O.W drama ‘The McKenzie Break’, playing a general aiding Brian Keith’s Captain Connor, in finding a group of escaped prisoners. Jack then played the wonderfully named Hamp Gurney, a dreary sailor in the equally dreary horror ‘Tower of Evil’ (’72). A couple of minor parts came next when he played an occultist in the Amicus anthology ‘From Beyond the Grave’ (’74), and then the chief engineer of a luxury liner threatened by a terrorist, in Richard Lester’s all-star thriller Juggernaut (‘74). Back in horror territory I enjoyed his unsmiling, ‘red-herring’ role in Pete Walker’s fun horror ‘Schizo’ (’76), after which he had a recurring part as the cowardly Morris, in the 1977 TV adventure series ‘Rob Roy’.

Watson was soon back on familiar ground when he co-starred in a trio of Roger Moore escapades; ‘The Wild Geese’ (1978), ‘The Sea Wolves’ and ‘North Sea Highjack’ (both ’80), all pretty good with ‘Wild Geese’ standing out as the most enjoyable. Watson’s last role of note was as union leader James Godbolt, in the superb 1985 mini-series ‘Edge of Darkness’, starring Bob Peck and Joe Don Baker. After a few more television appearances (‘Minder’ & ‘Heartbeat’), Watson retired from the screen in 1994.

A good, solid supporting presence in many a production, Jack Watson died in Somerset, England, on July 4th 1999, aged 84. With his well-worn face and muscular physique, Watson lent strong support in some fine military drama’s and a wrath of old-school adventures. A dependable supporting actor who often played parts that suited his looks, he certainly made ‘imposing’ look easy.

Favourite Movie: ‘The Hill’
Favourite Performance: ‘The Hill’

The above article can also be accessed online here.

Guy Rolfe was a very tall, lean-featured English actor who enjoyed a lengthy career on film both in Britain and in Hollywood. He was born in Kilburn, London in 1911. His screen debut was in 1937 in “Knight Without Armour”. He was particularily good at sneering villians and can be seen to good effect in “The Drum”, “Hungary Hill”,”The Spider and the Fly”, “Oddman Out”, “Ivanhoe” and “Mr Sardonicus” in 1962. At the age of 80 his acting career got a major lease of life with his portryal of Andre Toulan in the “Puppetmaster” movies which began for him in 1991 with “Puppetmaster 3 – Toulans Revenge” and continued until Puppet Master 5″ in 1994. Guy Rolfe died in London in 2003.

Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:

Among screen villains, one of the most hissable was Guy Rolfe, who has died aged 91. Often sporting a goatee-beard Rolfe, with his aquiline nose, gaunt and saturnine appearance, had something of the night about him. Although most of the roles he played were irredeemable baddies with little room for nuance, Rolfe was able to bring some dash and plausibility to them.

If he had not gone sinister in the 1950s, Rolfe might have continued in British films as another character actor playing staunch officers, kindly doctors and dependable policemen. He first shone in Robert Hamer’s atmospheric thriller The Spider And The Fly (1949) as a master thief turned spy.

He played a few romantic leads which might have been more convincingly taken by Stewart Granger or Dennis Price. In Prelude To Fame (1950), he was a philosophy professor who discovers an Italian boy who is a musical genius (Jeremy Spencer), only to regret the negative results of what fame has done to his protegé. Dance Little Lady (1952) saw him as a doctor falling for ballet dancer Mai Zetterling, whom he helps to walk again after an accident.

It was Hollywood, in the tradition of using British actors as well-spoken nasty types, which brought out Rolfe’s evil side. It started with him cast as the sinuous Prince John pitted against Robert Taylor’s Ivanhoe (1952). He had a lip-smacking moment when he condemned Elizabeth Taylor’s Rebecca as a witch who was to be burned at the stake.

Rolfe did not actually get to Hollywood because the epic was mostly shot at Boreham Wood Studios. But the following year, he capitalised on his new wickedness by getting cast as the cunning Ned Seymour in Young Bess, filmed at MGM’s Culver City Studios, and then browning-up as wily oriental characters in two examples of Hollywood exotica: King Of The Khyber Rifles in which Rolfe is Karram Khan, a rebel tribesman causing problems for British officer Tyrone Power, and Veils Of Bagdad as Kasseim, an evil vizier plotting against beefy Victor Mature.

Actually Rolfe was as British as they come. He was born in north London and after education at a state school, became a professional boxer and then a racing-car driver before deciding, aged 24, to take up acting. After provincial repertory came his walk-on film debut in Jacques Feyder’s Knight Without Armour (1937).

After the second world war, Rolfe was offered the role of the consumptive retired army officer who falls in love with a dying fellow patient (Jean Simmons) in Sanatorium, the last of the Somerset Maugham stories in Trio (1950), but ironically had to pull out when he himself contracted TB.

Rolfe, who was always elegantly dressed, and would often arrive at the studios in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, overcame his illness and continued to be in demand into his 80s, when he gathered a cult following of fans of schlocky slasher movies. This new lease of life came about in 1987, when the director Stuart Gordon tracked Rolfe down to Spain, where the actor had retired since the early 1970s, to appear in his film Dolls.

Gordon had remembered Rolfe from a low-budget William Castle shocker, Mr Sardonicus (1961). As Sardonicus, a decadent 19th-century aristocrat whose face has frozen into a hideous grin as a result of a frightening experience, Rolfe kidnaps Audrey Dalton to compel her surgeon lover, Ronald Lewis, to operate on his face.

In Dolls, Rolfe is benign in comparison as an aged doll-maker who lives with his wife in a gloomy mansion. In typical “old dark house” fashion, a number of strangers seek refuge from a storm. As the night progresses, the dolls come to life to take revenge on those who are mean and no longer children at heart.

The film led to his role as the insane puppeteer Andre Toulon, in a series of six Puppet Master movies, the last of which appeared in 1999. In this Rolfe managed to bring dignity and credibility to the thoroughly dislikable character who manipulates living dolls to do his bidding.

Rolfe is survived by his second wife, Margaret Allworthy.

· Guy (Edwin Arthur) Rolfe, actor, born December 27 1911; died October 19 2003

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters

Earl Cameron was born in 1917 in Bermuda. He cam to Britain in 1939. His stage debut was in 1942 in the West End in “Chu Chin Chow”. In 1951 he won a major role in the film “Pool of London”. Other films include “Simba”, “The Hearts Within”, “Sapphire” and “Flame in the Streets” in 1961. Recent film appearances include “The Queen” and “Inception”. BFI profile on Earl Cameron can be accessed here.

Hazel O’Connor was born in 1955 in Coventry. Her father came from Galway. She was a major force in British music in the late 70’s and into the 1980’s. Her films include “Girls Come First” in 1975 and “Breaking Glass”. Her website can be accessed here.

Derek Thompson was born in Belfast in 1948. As a teenage he formed a singing duo with his twin sister. In 1977 he gave a brilliant performance as Harry Moon in the iconic series “Rock Follies”. In 1980 he was in the excellent “The Long Good Friday” and two years later had one of the leading roles in TV’s “Harry’s Game”. In 1986 he was one of the lead actors in “Casualty” and is still in the series to-day. He is an integral part of the show but sometimes one wishes that he diversified into other roles.

IMDB entry:

Derek Thompson was born on April 4, 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is an actor, known for Casualty (1986), The Long Good Friday (1980) and The Gentle Touch (1980). He is married to Dee Sadler. They have one child.

Derek Thompson met his wife, Dee Sadler, when she appeared as Maggie, a cave explorer, in an episode of Casualty (1986) in which Derek plays Charlie Fairhead. Charlie rescued Maggie when she was trapped underground after suffering a fit.

The only original cast member of Casualty (1986) to never have left the series.

He has a twin sister, Elaine. In the early sixties they formed a singing duo, Elaine and Derek, and had a few records released. They appeared together in the film, Gonks Go Beat (1965).

He has played the same character (Charlie Fairhead) on three different series: Casualty(1986), Holby City (1999) and Holby Blue (2007).

The above IMDB entry can be accessed online here.

Peter Martyn was born in 1925 in London. His films include “Appointment with Venus” with David Niven and Glynis Johns in 1951, “Lady Godiva Rides Again” and “Orders are Orders”. He died in 1955 at the age of 30.

Bryan Forbes obituary in “The Guardian” in 2013.

Bryan Forbes was born in 1926 in West Ham, London. After military service from 1945 until 1948 he began a career as a supporting actor in British films including 1955’s “The Colditz Story”. His other films as an actor include “The League of Gemtlemen” with Jack Hawkins and Kieron Moore and “Sea Devils” with Rock Hudson, Maxwell Reed and Yvonne de Carlo. He made his directorial debut in 1961 with “Whitsle Down the Wind” with Alan Bates and Hayley Mills. His other films as a director ing Rat”, “The Stepford Wives” and “The Slipper and the Rose”. He was married for a time to the Irish actress Constance Smith and then married to Nanette Newman. He died in May, 2013.

Dennis Barker’s “Guardian” obituary:

The director, actor and writer Bryan Forbes, who has died aged 86, was one of the most creative forces in the British film industry of the 1960s, and the Hollywood films he directed included the original version of The Stepford Wives (1974). In later life he turned to the writing of books, both fiction and memoirs.

The turning point for him in cinema was the formation of the independent company Beaver Films with his friend Richard Attenborough in 1958. For the screenplay of their first production, The Angry Silence (1960), Forbes received an Oscar nomination and a Bafta award. Attenborough played a factory worker shunned and persecuted for not joining a strike. His colleagues are shown as being manipulated by skulking professional agitators and to some it seemed more like a political statement than a human story about the crushing of an individual.

Forbes then wrote and/or directed a string of notable British productions. He both wrote and took the part of one of the disaffected officers turning to crime in The League of Gentlemen (1960), and directed Whistle Down the Wind (1961), about children who mistake a convict on the run for Jesus. He took a novel by Lynne Reid Banks as the basis for The L-Shaped Room, which he also directed, and one by Kingsley Amis for Only Two Can Play (both 1962). He provided the screenplay for and directed Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), concerning the sinister abduction of a child, and The Whisperers (1967), in which Edith Evans was outstanding as a lonely old woman.

For Hollywood, Forbes scripted and directed King Rat (1965), a thoughtful study of British and American soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. It was a critical success and did well commercially – except in America.

Other Hollywood work arrived, but in 1969 Forbes accepted the offer of the impresario Bernard Delfont, then with EMI, to run Elstree Film Studios, which the company had taken over. This amounted virtually to an attempt to revive the ailing British film industry by instituting a traditional studio system with a whole slate of films in play, one of which happened to be from my political novel Candidate of Promise. However, some EMI executives raised difficulties over Forbes both heading the studio and directing his own film, The Raging Moon (1971), starring his wife Nanette Newman as a woman paralysed from the waist down who finds love.

One success of the venture was the production of The Railway Children (1970), but most of the announced films – including Candidate of Promise – were never made. Forbes, who had a three-year contract, left after two years, complaining privately that for the first time in his life he had made powerful enemies. Delfont’s explanation to me was that Forbes lacked business and organisational skills: “My mistake was not to see that he was creative, but only creative.”

For The Stepford Wives, William Goldman provided a screenplay from the surreal novel by Ira Levin, with Newman as the figure who became the computerised fantasy of boorish men in a small American town. The final Hollywood film that Forbes directed was The Naked Face (1984), with Roger Moore as a psychiatrist who gets caught up with the Chicago mafia. His last screenwriting credit came with Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992).

Forbes was born John Clarke into a working-class home in West Ham, east London. His cultural horizons were extended when he was evacuated during the second world war to Cornwall and stayed in Porthleven with the Rev Canon Gotto, a cultivated cleric with an enormous library. Forbes said that Gotto and his wife “gave me a grounding I wouldn’t have had otherwise”.

Another mentor was the BBC radio producer Lionel Gamlin, who made him question master of the Junior Brains Trust, and advised adopting his stage name of Bryan Forbes. (The actor John Clark, who portrayed Just William on radio for the BBC, had already registered his name with Equity.) Though he got to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 17, Forbes thought he was seen as too short and too “working-class” to play juvenile leads. He worked in repertory theatre, and had just taken over a part in Terence Rattigan’s Flare Path when he was called up for second world war service, first in the Intelligence Corps and then the Combined Services Entertainment Unit.

A published collection of short stories, Truth Lies Sleeping (1951), pointed to his promise as a writer, but his initial course was to continue acting. Presciently, he wrote to a friend while at a repertory company: “One day I shall direct a film – preferably a film of one of my own scripts.” He also took supporting film roles when possible. His first film appearances had included Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Small Back Room, and the comedy Dear Mr Prohack (both 1949), the latter adapted from an Arnold Bennett novel.

In the early 1950s, he went to Hollywood with the actor who was briefly his first wife, Constance Smith. But it was not long before he returned to Britain and undertook the rewriting of scripts as well as acting. In 1954 he had a part in Guy Hamilton’s film of JB Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls and the following year he starred in the same director’s classic war film The Colditz Story, whose cast included John Mills and Lionel Jeffries. He met his second wife, Newman, while playing a man being run over by a train. They got married in 1955.

When he returned to writing books, it was with wry fiction about the tribulations suffered by the creative spirit in showbiz, The Distant Laughter (1972) and The Rewrite Man (1983). Ned’s Girl (1977) was a biography of Evans, and That Despicable Race (1980) concerned actors as a breed. Later novels were mostly about spies, though sometimes embraced comedy, as with Partly Cloudy (1995), about domestic disasters brought about by the clash of the generations during one traumatic weekend.

Forbes was a founder of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain; with Attenborough he helped form Capital Radio, the London station launched in 1973; and he served as president of the National Youth Theatre. He wrote with incomparable irony about the bizarre workings of the film industry in his two volumes of autobiography, Notes for a Life (1974) and A Divided Life (1992). In 2004 he was appointed CBE.

He is survived by Newman and their daughters, Emma and Sarah.

• Bryan Forbes (John Theobald Clarke), actor, director and writer, born 22 July 1926; died 8 May 2013

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Nigel Terry obituary in “The Guardian” in 2015.

Nigel Terry was born in 1945 in Bristol. He is probably best known for his major role as King Arthur in John Boorman’s “Excalibur” in 1981 Other films include “The Lion in Winter” with Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in 1969 and the title role in Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” in 1986. Sadly he died in his homeplace of Cornwall in Aprl 2015.

His “Guardian” obituary:

Every now and then, a strange and mystical being wanders through the British theatre, and Nigel Terry, who has died of emphysema aged 69, was a prime example. Terry was admired by all who worked with him and revered by his contemporaries, fully deserving that over-used description “an actor’s actor”.

He made a sensational film debut in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968) as a drooling young Prince John, no way fazed by playing scenes with Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. But unlike his fellow debutants on this film – Anthony Hopkins and Timothy Dalton – he became a hermit to Hollywood until he burst forth again as a rueful, melancholic King Arthur in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), playing opposite Helen Mirren as Morgana and Nicol Williamson as Merlin.

O’Toole and Williamson took a shine to Terry and they became his idols, as much for their independence and bolshiness as for their talent. Naturally taciturn and suspicious, Terry was an ideal actor – along with Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean – for the independent, idiosyncratic film-maker Derek Jarman, notably playing the title role in Caravaggio (1986) as a bisexual voluptuary with a stylish goatee and a gleaming eye; he was good at being lustful, sweaty, intense.

Otherwise, he worked mostly in theatre, but not exclusively with any one company or director. He was prominent on the fringe of both the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, often working with fellow mavericks such as the director Max Stafford-Clark and the playwright Howard Barker. He played Byron in the first revival in 1988 of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, at the Royal Court; he was, said a fellow cast member, Sian Thomas, “beautiful, turbulent, wild

The wildness came from a deep, still centre. Off stage, in the pub, I remember him rolling his own cigarettes, very slowly, while staring into a pint. As a student, he drove a flatmate crazy with his protracted silences at the breakfast table. “I can’t stand your fucking moods!” the flatmate exclaimed one morning. Another silence of 10 minutes. “Moods?” Terry muttered, darkly.

He was always going to be an artist, preferably a painter, from a young age. His ancestry was English, Irish and Huguenot. He was the first baby born in Bristol after the end of the second world war, the only child of Frank Terry, an RAF pilot, and his wife, Doreen (nee Such). The family moved to Truro, in Cornwall, where his father was a senior probation officer.

Terry developed his passion for acting, and painting, while at Truro school, joined the National Youth Theatre in his holidays, and worked briefly in forestry and as a petrol pump attendant before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 1963. He made a stage debut with Dolphin Theatre at the Shaw Theatre in north London, playing Evans in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet.

After seasons in rep at the Oxford Playhouse and the Bristol Old Vic and The Lion in Winter, he appeared in controversial new plays at the Royal Court, including the premieres of Edward Bond’s The Fool (1975) and Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976). At the RSC in the late 1970s he was Soranzo in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Casca in Julius Caesar.

He featured in a notable season at the National in 1981, playing the lead in Molière’s Don Juan as a brazen but unflustered Spanish nobleman, as if, said the Guardian critic Michael Billington, David Niven were playing Tamburlaine. He also played a laconic Rakitin in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, opposite a refulgent Francesca Annis. Both shows were directed by Peter Gill, and I’ll never forget Terry’s bitter declaration in the latter, almost a credo, that all love was a catastrophe.

In Barker’s Victory (1983), he was Charles II, and in his The Bite of the Night (1988), directed by Danny Boyle, he was “the last classics teacher at a defunct university” who goes in search of Homer, Eros and Helen of Troy. Also in the 80s he led a brilliant production of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed directed by Yuri Lyubimov at the Almeida and, for the RSC, played a sinister Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi, with Harriet Walter in the title role, and a great double of Shylock and Benedick, opposite Fiona Shaw, on a small-scale tour of The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing.

In his last major film, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), an epic starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, Terry had the joy of playing a Trojan high priest and adviser to O’Toole’s King Priam. But you get the measure of the man, and his mystery, in the Jarman movies, not only Caravaggio, but also War Requiem (1989), an experimental docudrama using Benjamin Britten’s momentous music and featuring Laurence Olivier in his last ever appearance on stage or screen.

In Jarman’s Edward II (1991), an outrageous version of Marlowe’s play, Terry played Mortimer, and the king’s army were a bunch of gay rights marchers, while in the extraordinary Blue (1993), shot entirely in a shimmering shade of aquamarine, Terry, Swinton, John Quentin and Jarman himself, on the brink of death from Aids, read from the director’s diaries and other writings.

Terry moved from London back to Cornwall in 1993 and spent the rest of his days there, partly to be near his parents in their last years but also to enjoy the beauty of the cliffs and sea.

Deeply attractive and private to the last, he lived alone in a cottage near St Ives.

The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.

• Peter Nigel Terry, actor, born 15 August 1945; died 30 April 2015

Helen Worth is best known as Gail Platt in the long running “Coronation Street” which she has played since 1974. She was born in 1951 in Wakefield. Her first television appearance was in an episode of “Z Cars”.

Collection of Classic Brittish Actors

Jack Watson

Jack Watson obituary in “The Independent” in 1999

Guy Rolfe

Earl Cameron

Hazel O’Connor

Derek Thompson

Peter Martyn

Bryan Forbes

Bryan Forbes obituary in “The Guardian” in 2013.

Nigel Terry

Nigel Terry obituary in “The Guardian” in 2015.

Helen Worth

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