JACK HEDLEY

(28 October 1929 - 11 December 2021)

The British actor Jack Hedley, who has died from a heart attack at the age of 92, had a service background which may account for some of the parts he played. He often acted as authority figures which may have arisen from his time at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. After leaving the college he was a marine commando for eight years, served in the war but returned to civilian life following injuries. He worked for his mother's direct mail company but eventually auditioned for Rada. To join Equity, the actors' union, he needed to change his birth name of Jack Hawkins to Jack Hedley.

Beginning with The Buccaneers in 1957, television served him well, with his biggest success being three Francis Durbridge serials The World of Tim Frazer, in a sort of cut-price 007 role, in the early 1960s. Later he was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Colditz series and in 1977 played a former resistance fighter in Who Pays the Ferryman, set on Crete. Among other TV programmes and TV films he played opposite Phyllis Calvert's agony aunt in seventeen episodes of Kate and was in some of the One by One series about a zoo vet.

His first film was A Night to Remember in 1958, an uncredited passenger role, then came Behind the Mask with Michael Redgrave, Jack Clayton's Room at the Top and Sidney Gilliat's Left Right and Centre. He was an officer in Cone of Silence (aka Trouble in the Sky) and was Billie Whitelaw's policeman boyfriend in Make Mine Mink. He was another officer in The Longest Day, the D-Day epic, and a reporter in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Other films included Nine Hours to Rama, about an attempted assassination of Gandhi, The Secret of Blood Island, The Anniversary with Bette Davis, Goodbye, Mr Chips (the musical), The Devil's Advocate with John Mills, and the Bond movie For Your Eyes Only in which he played a millionaire with a parrot for which Hedley provided the voice-over. He retired after St Paul, a TV mini-series in 2000. Jack Hedley married secretary Jean Fraser in 1965 and they have two sons. His second wife was Elspeth Daintry and after their divorce he was married to Alex Westendarp from 2001.

MICHAEL DARVELL