John Bardon

Born: August 25, 1939; Died: September 12, 2014

JOHN BARDON, who has died aged 75, started his working life measuring men for suits in Austin Reed the tailors and was in his thirties before he became a professional actor. Another 25 years went by before he became famous as Jim Branning, the straight-talking widower who romanced Dot Cotton and became a much-loved regular on EastEnders.

Between 1996 and 2011 he appeared in almost 900 episodes of the soap and he was recognised as far away as Turkey, where he had a holiday home and where fans told him they watched the show to improve their English.

He had a solid resume in television and theatre when he made a guest appearance on EastEnders in 1996, turning up at Albert Square to attend his daughter April's wedding.

When that was called off, his other daughter Carol decided to marry her boyfriend instead. But Jim stormed out because the groom was black.

Jim became a regular in 1999, the writers softened the character and he became great friends with the Caribbean shopkeeper Patrick Trueman (Rudolph Walter). He provided much of the show's humour, on one occasion inadvertently vacuuming up the budgie.

He was born John Michael Jones in Brentford, Middlesex, in 1939. After leaving school he worked for the men's outfitters Austin Reed in London and also in shops they ran on the transatlantic liners. He began acting in theatre, working in repertory at Exeter.

To avoid confusion with other Joneses, he needed a more distinctive stage name. Actors will often use their mother's maiden name, but Bardon did not fancy being called John Alcock. He opted for his grandmother's maiden name instead.

He had small roles in the films S*P*Y*S (1974), Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould's follow up to M*A*S*H, and Walt Disney's One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing (1975). And he played the film director in Ring Dem Bells (1975), one of the funniest episodes of Dad's Army, with the Home Guard dressing up as German soldiers for a training film with predictable results.

Bardon became an increasingly familiar face on British television and had recurring roles as Jim Davidson's dad in the sitcom Up the Elephant and Round the Castle (1983-85) and as part of a notorious Timson family in Rum-pole of the Bailey (1987-92). He briefly appeared in Coronation Street in 1990.

He also enjoyed success on stage. He toured for years with a one-man show about Max Miller called Here's a Funny Thing, which visited the Edinburgh Fringe in 1980, and he won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Kiss Me, Kate, which came to the Theatre Royal Glasgow in 1987.

On the big screen he appeared in East is East (1999) as the foul-mouthed Mr Moorhouse, who campaigns for Enoch Powell and is outraged at his family's friendship with Asian neighbours.

It was around that time that the EastEnders producers called him with the offer of a regular role on the soap. He later recalled: "They said 'It will change your life forever,' which it has done."

His character drank, and subsequently worked, in the Queen Vic, and the writers quickly toned down his previous racist views. He and June Brown, who played Dot, were sceptical about plans to marry them off. He romanced Dot in a graveyard and went down on one knee to propose in the London Eye. "We've had some nice things to do. It's worked out all right," he said in one interview.

Twice Bardon and Brown won the award for best on-screen partnership at the British Soap Awards, in 2002 and 2005. They were close off-screen too and Brown went on holiday with Bardon and his wife Enda.

He suffered a stroke in 2007 which the scriptwriters wrote into the storyline. Bardon returned to East- Enders in 2009, but continued to struggle with ill health and left permanently in 2011, with the character going off to a care home.

He is survived by Enda. He was 62 when they met, they married in 2002 and he described her as "the jewel of my life".