BERNARD HEPTON

(19 October 1925 - 27 July 2018)

The Yorkshire-born actor Bernard Hepton, who has died aged 92, began his career on stage at the Bradford Civic Playhouse, then worked in York and subsequently ran both the Birmingham Rep and Liverpool Playhouse. He joined the BBC in 1964 as an actor and director but it was for acting that he became known and for most of his working life television reigned. He was in TV movies from 1955: You Never Can Tell, A Man for All Seasons, Summer and Winter, etc, plus such series as Great Expectations (as Wemmick), The Newcomers, Middlemarch, The Troubleshooters, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (as Cranmer), Z Cars and The Organisation, among many more. He will be remembered particularly for Colditz (as the Kommandant), Churchill’s People, Sadie, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Secret Army, An Inspector Calls, Mansfield Park, Bleak House and The Old Devils. For the cinema his first film was A Boy, a Girl and a Bike in 1949. He was a soldier in Olivier’s Richard III, and later on was in Get Carter. He played Cranmer again in the film of Henry VIII and His Six Wives, was a diner in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and a passenger on Voyage of the Damned. During the 1980s he voiced a part in the animated Plague Dogs and appeared in Gandhi, The Holcroft Covenant, Shadey and Stealing Heaven. His last films were Eminent Domain (1990) and The Baroness and the Pig (2002), plus a TV serialisation of Jane Austen’s Emma in which he played Mr Woodhouse in 2008. Bernard Hepton was married twice, to the actresses Nancie Jackson and Hilary Liddell, both of whom predeceased him.

MICHAEL DARVELL