Actor and star of The Adventures of Black Beauty

Born: April 14, 1925;

Died: July 8 2016

WILLIAM Lucas, who has died aged 91, appeared in more than 100 television shows and films, playing Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes television series in 1968, Elsie Tanner’s lover in Coronation Street in a running storyline in 1971 and one of the expat regulars in almost 100 episodes of the BBC soap opera Eldorado (1992-93).

But he enjoyed his greatest success in The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972-74) as the country doctor who is given the titular horse by one of his patients. Inspired by Anna Sewell’s classic novel, it owed as much to Champion the Wonder Horse and The Famous Five, with the horse and Lucas’s children rescuing people in distress and foiling various sinister plots.

It was required Sunday viewing for many families and proved so popular internationally that a New Zealand company revived it as The New Adventures of Black Beauty in 1990. Lucas returned as Dr James Gordon, emigrating to New Zealand with one of his now grown-up children. There is a new Black Beauty.

The original series debuted in 1972, the year after the first series of Follyfoot, and the two equine family entertainments became firm favourites of a generation. Both had distinctive theme tunes and the Black Beauty music was used in the 1990s in a dream sequence in Absolutely Fabulous and at the end of the first series of I’m Alan Partridge, with Alan hailing it as “brilliant”.

The son of a steelworker, William Thomas Clucas was born in Manchester in 1925. He would later knock the initial letter of his surname to make it easier to remember and pronounce. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and had a string of short-term jobs, including labourer and lorry driver, before going to the Northern Theatre School on a scholarship.

He started his showbusiness career in English provincial theatre and began to appear regularly in television and occasionally in films from the mid-1950s onwards, with starring roles in various now-forgotten series and one-off television plays.

There were also guest appearances in the likes of The Saint in 1965 and The Avengers, in which he played two different roles, in 1967 and 1968. But Black Beauty raised his profile still further, as only a central role in a major hit series can do.

He had married actress Rowena Ingram in 1954 and they had two sons, Thomas and Daniel, who also became an actor, using the original surname Clucas. Daniel was a member of the Royal Lyceum Theatre company in Edinburgh in the early 1980s and father and son appeared together in Gore Vidal’s political drama The Best Man at the Lyceum in 1981.

Lucas continued to make guest appearances in many hit shows and was a last-minute addition to the cast for the 1984 Doctor Who story Frontios. The role was originally intended for Peter Arne, who was bludgeoned to death by an acquaintance just before production began.

Lucas’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife and by his two sons from his first marriage.

BRIAN PENDREIGH