Actor and playwright Born March 11, 1926 Died March 10, 2009 Derek Benfield, who has died of cancer aged 82, spent years working away anonymously in the theatre and on television before becoming a star in his late forties when he played the haulage boss Bill Riley on The Brothers (1972-76), a series that managed to make compelling drama out of the changing nature of industrial relations and the class system.
Audiences warmed to the balding, middle-aged actor, with the lived-in face, and he went on to play Leo McKern's clerk Albert Handyside in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-80), shopkeeper Mr Scrimshaw in First of the Summer Wine (1988-89), the prequel to Last of the Summer Wine, and Patricia Routledge's disapproving husband in the offbeat northern detective series Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996-98).
Around the same time as his breakthrough on The Brothers, Benfield also found his writing career taking off.
He had begun acting in Brian Rix farces and, although he wrote several episodes of the police series Dixon of Dock Green in the 1960s, it was his farces that were to enjoy greatest and most enduring success.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Arthur Lowe made a mini-career from touring in one of his plays. He starred in Beyond a Joke, not only in England, but also in Australia and New Zealand.
His farces have also proved popular with amateur companies - Crieff Drama Group has recently staged First Things First, a comedy about a man who suddenly discovers he was wrong in his belief that his first wife was dead.
Born in Bradford in 1926, Benfield served in the Green Howards during the Second World War, worked for the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Jerusalem and trained at Rada, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London.
He spent many years with repertory theatre companies in England. He met his wife, actress Susan Lyall Grant, and wrote his first play The Young in Heart (1953) during a stint in Preston, Lancashire.
During the 1960s, he appeared in several TV staples, including Z Cars and Coronation Street, on which he played Walter Greenhalgh, whose wife was a friend of Elsie Tanner.
He was a disapproving father whose children keep slipping through time and getting stuck at various dangerous junctures in the past and the future in Timeslip (1970-71).
Benfield died of stomach cancer just a few hours short of his 83rd birthday. He is survived by his wife, two children and two grandsons.
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