Actor

Born: April 8, 1944;

Died: July 25, 2017

HYWEL Bennett, who has died aged 73, was one of British cinema’s brightest stars in the 1960s and early 1970s when he appeared in a string of hit films including The Virgin Soldiers (1969) and Percy (1971), though he is possibly best known as the titular chancer in the sitcoms Shelley (1979-84) and The Return of Shelley (1988-92).

Bennett and his girlfriend Cathy McGowan, presenter of the pop music show Ready Steady Go!, were among Britain’s leading celebrities in 1970 when crowds turned up to see them get married at a London church. The wedding even featured on the Pathe cinema news, with the commentator noting that “the combination made it a field day for photographers.”

Wide-eyed and strikingly handsome in his younger days, Bennett possessed a soft, seductive voice and a natural and impudent charm. He starred in several risqué comedies, but he was also very effective when cast against type early in his career as a schizophrenic killer in the Hitchcockian thriller Twisted Nerve (1968), one of three films he made with Hayley Mills.

He gave one of his most compelling performances as the maverick intelligence agent Ricki Tarr in the brilliant 1979 television adaptation of John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He was still an amiable chancer, but battling personal demons and torments, following the disappearance and killing of his lover, a Soviet agent who had information on a mole in British intelligence.

Bennett drank heavily throughout much of his career and his looks faded with time. In later years he was almost unrecognisable and was more readily cast as thugs and villains than as lovable rogues and charmers.

In 2003 Bennett appeared in several episodes of EastEnders as Jack Dalton, the gangster who supposedly ordered the killing of Dirty Den years earlier. Dalton is subsequently murdered by one of his most trusted lieutenants, who turns out to be Den’s illegitimate son.

Hywel Thomas Bennett was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Carmarthenshire in Wales. When he was about five the family moved to London, where his father worked as a policeman.

Bennett joined the National Youth Theatre and toured in an NYT production of Hamlet in the unlikely role of Ophelia. He attended RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, and played one of the fishy Aridian humanoids in Doctor Who in 1965 before being cast as the young husband who has trouble consummating his marriage to Hayley Mills in The Family Way the following year.

It was the first in a series of major British films, including The Virgin Soldiers, a 1970 adaptation of Joe Orton’s Loot and the controversial comedy Percy, in which Bennett played a man who receives the world’s first penis transplant – a particularly large organ, which he nicknames Percy.

On the back of stardom Bennett enjoyed the champagne lifestyle, literally. The legendary film critic Roger Ebert reported meeting him when he came to promote Twisted Nerve in the US and Bennett telling him that he been warned against going to Harlem, but had his chauffeur drive him there for a night of drinking with the locals.

During Ebert’s allotted interview time Bennett quaffed several pints of Guinness and chatted up a woman in the bar where they met. “Would you believe that I think you look like Hedy Lamarr, who was the most beautiful woman in the world?” he asked. “No,” the girl said, “but you look like Hywel Bennett, the movie star.”

The interview finally took place next morning with a bleary-eyed Bennett, in the limousine on the way to the airport. Ebert recalled stopping in a poor neighbourhood where children watched in wonder as Bennett shook a bottle of champagne till the cork popped out, before getting back in the car, filling the glasses and resuming his bender.

But Bennett once remarked that his success came at “the tail end” of the studio system, when the film industry was in steep decline. Increasingly he worked in television, where Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy allowed him to show his range as a serious actor.

Shelley made him one of the best-paid actors on British TV. The central character was highly educated, but decidedly work-shy, left-leaning, but somewhat hypocritical, redeemed by his sharp wit and intelligence. It ran for ten series, including The Return of Shelley, 71 episodes in total, attracting audiences of up to 18 million.

Other notable television shows include Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (1978) and Karaoke (1996) and The Bill, on which he made ten appearances as the sex offender Peter Baxter between 2002 and 2005. He also did theatre and was the reassuring voice of British Rail on commercials in the 1980s.

He had a daughter with Cathy McGowan, but his drinking became problematic and they divorced in 1988. He married for a second time in 1998. But seemingly continued to struggle with alcohol problems.

In 2004 the Sunday Mirror reported: “With his huge belly protruding from a scruffy tracksuit, it's difficult to believe this shambling figure was once the highest-paid star on British television.Unshaven and reeking of drink, Hywel Bennett is barely recognisable as his lovable 80s sitcom alter-ego Shelley.”

It said he was banned from at least two bars in the Kent resort of Deal, where he lived in a 17th century cottage with a bell, which he would ring late at night, while shouting a warning, according to the paper, that there was a storm coming.

He is survived by his daughter and second wife.

BRIAN PENDREIGH