HYWEL BENNETT

(8 April 1944 - 25 July 2017)

The Welsh actor Hywel Bennett, who has died at the age of 73, joined the National Youth Theatre for five years and also trained at Rada. In his time he played many Shakespearean roles including both Hamlet and Ophelia. His television debut was in Doctor Who in 1965 and he went on to appear regularly on the box until his first film, the Boulting brothers’ The Family Way (1966), from the play by Bill Naughton about newlyweds’ difficulty in consummating their marriage. His co-star was Hayley Mills with whom he appeared in two other films, Twisted Nerve and Endless Night. Some of his other films were The Virgin Soldiers, Loot, The Buttercup Chain, Percy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Love Ban, and Deadly Advice, in which he played Dr Crippen. Bennett was particularly good in Simon Gray’s TV play Death of a Teddy Bear, as the murderous young man involved in a case based on the Rattenbury scandal of the 1930s. However, from the many television series he appeared in, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Boon, The Bill and EastEnders, he will be most remembered for Peter Tilbury’s Shelley, a long-running sitcom about a permanently unemployed waster, which ran for five years from 1979, and then came back as The Return of Shelley from 1988 to 1992. Hywel Bennett was first married to the journalist and broadcaster Cathy McGowan, with whom he had a daughter, Emma, and later married Sandra Fulford. He retired in 2007 due to ill-health.

MICHAEL DARVELL