Tom Adams

Born: March 9, 1938;

Died: December 11, 2014.

Tom Adams, who has died of cancer aged 76, had been working as a drama teacher and had made a handful of walk-on appearances in television programmes when he was suddenly cast alongside Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Richard Attenborough as one of the prisoners of war in the classic 1963 war film The Great Escape.

He played Dai Nimmo, the RAF officer, in charge of "diversions", various ventures to divert the attention of the German guards, while his colleagues dug escape tunnels beneath their feet. These included concerts and football matches.

It was an eye-opener for Adams, witnessing the lifestyle and demands of the stars, including McQueen's insistence that he wanted to wear co-star James Garner's white jumper.

Nimmo was also impressed by the real-life veterans he met at the time and at various subsequent events. However at one event in 2003 he noted that by that juncture there seemed to be more real-life survivors than there were survivors from the film. Bronson died that year, Coburn the previous year and McQueen had died in 1980.

Tall, dark and handsome, Adams had a string of major roles in popular television series after The Great Escape, playing doctors in Emergency - Ward 10 (1964) and General Hospital (1975-78) and the sea captain Daniel Fogarty in The Onedin Line (1977-78).

The son of a chauffeur, he was born Anthony Frederick Charles Adams in London in 1938. He did national service in the Army, joined the left-wing Unity Theatre in London and adopted the stage name Initially his main source of income came from teaching drama at a secondary modern school in the Poplar area of London.

He played the reckless soldier Anatol Kuragin in an ITV production of War and Peace in March 1963. But his big break was The Great Escape, a film based on a mass escape of 76 prisoners from the German POW camp Stalag Luft III. All but three of the prisoners were recaptured and most were summarily executed.

But the escape was seen by many as an example of British courage and ingenuity, albeit that the focus in the film was on the American stars, including McQueen who managed to get over the fence on a motorbike.

Adams, whose character in the film was a composite, later recalled: "Steve McQueen was as mad as a hatter - he wrote off six or seven cars out there."

But Adams readily acknowledged that he had a certain elusive charm. I couldn't put my finger on it. There he was, about five foot seven, skinny... But on nights out in Munich, if he walked into the bar, the women - whoomph - would be around him."

While McQueen had written off an entire garage worth of cars, the money Adams made from the film enabled him to buy his first vehicle.

It also opened other doors and the following year he was cast as the registrar Guy Marshall in ITV's long-running hospital soap Emergency - Ward 10. He was a regular on the show for several months, but had left long before it was cancelled in 1967.

ITV boss Lew Grade admitted its cancellation was a mistake and in 1972 he dusted off the formula as General Hospital and subsequently brought Adams back as another doctor, also called Guy.

In the meantime Adams had been considered for the role of James Bond and although he lost out he did get his own largely-forgotten secret agent series, playing Charles Vine in three films.

First up was Licensed to Kill (1965), re-edited and released in the US with a new Sammy Davis Jr theme song under the title The 2nd Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World.

It was followed by Where the Bullets Fly (1966) and Somebody's Stolen Our Russian Spy, but by that point interest had waned and the final instalment collected dust for years after filming before finally coming out in 1975.

Adams got the chance to appear in a rather more realistic espionage drama when he played Major Sullivan in the BBC's Spy Trap (1973-75).

The shipping period drama The Onedin Line was an established hit when he joined it in 1977 as Daniel Fogarty, a ship's captain who marries into the Onedin family, becomes an MP and ambassador and is lost at sea in the final series in 1980.

Other screen roles include a psychopathic killer who steps from the pages of novelist Denholm Elliott's latest book in the Hammer horror film The House That Dripped Blood (1971) and the commander of a maritime missile facility in Warriors of the Deep, a 1984 Doctor Who adventure involving Silurians and Sea Devils.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s he appeared occasionally on Emmerdale as the character Malcolm Bates.

Adams never married and did not have children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH