Television industryObituaryTerence Alexander
A suave and urbane actor, he found fame in the TV show BergeracTerence Alexander, who has died aged 86 from Parkinson's disease, was best known for his role as Charlie Hungerford in the BBC TV detective series Bergerac. As well as an actor, he was also a quirkily amateur numerologist.
Even at the time of his first stage appearance - on 23 December 1939 in Harrogate, as the young journalist in JB Priestley's The Good Companions - he was forming the view that 23 was, for him, a mystical number. As time went on this hardened into certainty. His school number at Ratcliffe college, he would point out at the dinner parties he loved giving, was 23. His first important part, with John Gielgud in Macbeth, opened on 23 December 1941. He joined the army on 23 April 1943 and was wounded, his leg damaged and his foot half blown off by shrapnel, on 23 April the following year. He was demobilised at the age of 23. He married the 23-year-old Juno Stevas, idiosyncratic sister of the politician and barrister Norman St John-Stevas, on 14 January 1949 - he had intended to marry on the 23rd, but it was a Sunday.
And it was 23 years later that the marriage ended in divorce and he married the actress Jane Downs - by which time he had not shed his numerological beliefs, though he was less keen on mentioning them.
Terence Alexander, in short, was a charmingly eccentric phenomenon of postwar British stage, film, TV and tabloid. He was a skilled foil. In three films he was straight man to the knockabout comic Norman Wisdom, who always congratulated him on being able to keep a straight face. Later Alexander admitted that had he not been making so much money from these films, he would have told Wisdom that the reason for his straight face was that he did not find Wisdom remotely funny. He had his waspish side.
Though best known to a younger generation as Charlie Hungerford, the Jersey millionaire businessman and power broker of Detective Sergeant Jim Bergerac, played by John Nettles, Alexander had been a good-looking but slightly twitchy character actor for the stage and large and small screens for half a century.
After attending Ratcliffe college, Leicester (where he was so thin he was nicknamed Fatty), and Norwood college, Harrogate, followed by war service in the 27th Lancers in Italy, Alexander made his London stage debut at the Princes Theatre in 1950 in Party Manners, a title that encapsulated his precariously urbane acting style. He was tall, with thin features that were both flirtatious and unreliable; he frequently wore a lounge-lizard's moustache, and his eyes were both inquisitive and evasive. Unreliable friends, fraudulent police officers, con-men heading for self-inflicted disaster - all these were his bread and butter, though he could aspire to higher things, too, such as Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts and Brassac in Anouilh's Poor Bitos.
Though he appeared in numerous West End hits - Move Over Mrs Markham (1971), Two and Two Make Sex (1973), and There Goes the Bride (1974) - and successful films such as The League of Gentlemen (1960), The Magic Christian (1969), Waterloo (1970) and The Day of the Jackal (1973) - he always claimed to be in the red until 1981, when he got the part he was to play for 10 years in Bergerac.
He got the role of Hungerford by accident. The series producer had spotted him from his car, hurrying along a Fulham street informally dressed. He took it (wrongly, though Alexander never let on) that the actor was in a tracksuit, running. Since Hungerford had to be a rugged fellow able to take care of himself physically as well as financially, the producer offered Alexander the part that was to make him a household name.
It was odd that Alexander should play the robust Hungerford when his own health and temper were deteriorating - a condition of the retina made him blind in one eye and threatened the sight in the other. He might suddenly explode if another actor fluffed his lines. He declined all stage work because he said it made him unbearably nervous.
His insecure suavity as a performer, in US eyes so typically British, retained its value across the Atlantic. He was credible as a button-holed, velvet-collared villain in The Champions (1969) and he also appeared in The Avengers (1965-69). Both these series gave him a domestic and world audience running into millions. In 1967 he was Montague Dartie in The Forsyte Saga, and in later years he became involved in a new wave of British TV comedy with Rik Mayall in The New Statesman (1989-92).
He loved good living, in at least one reference book listing "buying wine at keen prices" as a hobby. He latterly lived in a comparatively modest two-bedroomed house in Fulham, south-west London, the walls covered in valuable drawings and paintings. Before that he had lived in a rather grander house in Twickenham with his first wife, who left Richmond council amid a scandalous frisson after insisting on calling the mayor and sundry officials at council meetings "darling" or "pet".
Even so, Alexander claimed to be far from well-off, expressing delight and relief that his two sons by his first marriage, Nick and Marcus, had not gone into acting but were in serious business, earning much more than he was. He is survived by them and Jane.
Terence Joseph Alexander, actor, born 11 March 1923; died 28 May 2009
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