Bill Pertwee

Bill Pertwee, who has died aged 86, made his name as the irascible ARP Warden Hodges in the 1970s BBC sitcom Dad’s Army; he also successfully featured in Round The Horne.

Bill Pertwee, who played ARP Warden Hodges in Dad's Army, has died at the age of 86 

As chief tormentor of the local Home Guard commander, Capt Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe), Warden Hodges proved far more of an irritant than the armed hordes of Nazi Germany which (almost) invariably left the citizens of Walmington-on-Sea in peace.

Dressed in the brief authority of wartime office, Hodges pulled rank at every opportunity to act as a one-man counterweight to the military might represented by Capt Mainwaring’s platoon. With the perfect put-down — Hodges riled Mainwaring by twitting him as “Napoleon” — Pertwee played the town’s tinpot dictator with total aplomb.

The show’s creators, David Croft and Jimmy Perry, were apt to use the same coterie of actors in all their television series, and so Pertwee followed his long-running part in Dad's Army with a regular part of the policeman, PC Wilson, in You Rang M’Lord?, which ran for 26 episodes between 1988 and 1992.Yet it was as Warden Hodges that Pertwee found his place in the public imagination. For away from the Home Guard parades and manoeuvres, the character was a humble high street greengrocer, as in thrall to (and in fact in awe of) the pompous bank manager – Mainwaring – as Cpl Jones (the butcher) and even Pte Fraser (the undertaker). And it was upon such satirical appreciation of the essentially English nuances of class that the huge success of Dad’s Army was built.

William Desmond Anthony Pertwee was born on July 21 1926 at Amersham, Buckinghamshire, the youngest of three brothers. His father, who was of Huguenot descent (the family name originally having been Pertuis), had not followed his own father into farming, but made his living as an engineer working for a firm selling tarmacadam to councils. His mother had herself been born in Brazil.

In the early 1930s the family moved to Glasbury-on-Wye in Radnorshire, and then, as their fortunes faltered, to Colnbrook, near Windsor, Newbury, and finally Erith in Kent. There, Bill’s eldest brother joined the Atlas Preservative Company as export manager, the managing director being a 20-year-old Denis Thatcher, whose father owned the firm.

Bill was educated at a local convent and, following his father’s death, moved with his mother and brothers to Blackheath, south London. Evacuated at the outbreak of the Second World War to Sussex, he attended a local private school run by an eccentric called Felix Eames.

Another move, to Wilmington in Kent, landed him at Dartford Technical College, and in 1941 his eldest brother, who had joined the RAF, was killed when his aircraft crashed in Yorkshire while returning from a bombing mission over Germany.

After the family’s final move, to Westcliff-on-Sea, Bill found a place at Southend College and took a job at the Southend Motor and Aero Club, which before the war had repaired funfair rides and dodgem cars, but was then making parts for Spitfire cannons.

When the war ended, Pertwee was offered a job with Oxley Knox, a firm of City stockbrokers, but was sacked when he answered the office telephone with a facetious impression of the broadcaster Raymond Glendinning, only to find Mr Knox of Oxley Knox on the other end. An advertisement in The Daily Telegraph for salesmen vacancies at Burberry’s new sports department led to another job, but a family friend soon offered him a better one in his window and office cleaning business.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s Pertwee developed his interest in showbusiness, becoming a regular at opening nights in the West End. In 1954 he became an assistant to his second cousin, the actor Jon Pertwee, and the following year he turned professional, joining a variety bill at Gorleston near Great Yarmouth on £6 a week.

As a performer his first big radio break came in the early 1960s as a regular in the comedy series Beyond Our Ken, starring Kenneth Horne, followed by Round The Horne. The latter achieved cult status, but after eight years Pertwee was abruptly dropped. He wrote to various television producers asking for work, and was used as a warm-up man on such shows as Hancock and Up Pompeii, before in 1968 David Croft offered him a few episodes as the Warden in Dad’s Army. The booking eventually lasted for nine years.

As well as the stage version of Dad’s Army (Shaftesbury, 1975) Pertwee also starred in the Ray Cooney farce There Goes The Bride, his first West End role, at the Piccadilly Theatre. In 1975 he was part of the Dad’s Army ensemble that took part in the Royal Variety Performance. In the 1980s he appeared in the Ray Cooney farces See How They Run and Run For Your Wife, which successfully toured in Canada.

Pertwee was the author of several books, the first of which, Promenades and Pierrots (1979) traced the history of seaside entertainment in Britain. A follow-up, By Royal Command (1981), looked at the links between the Royal family and showbusiness. His autobiography, A Funny Way To Make A Living, appeared in 1996.

Bill Pertwee married, in 1960, Marion Rose. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their son, Jon, who is also an actor.

Bill Pertwee, born July 21 1926, died May 27 2013

Brian Greenhoff

Brian Greenhoff, who has died aged 60, was a central defender with Manchester United and earned 18 caps for England.

Brian Greenhoff 

Greenhoff’s years at Old Trafford (1973-79) were not among the club’s most illustrious. In 1974 United — who no longer enjoyed the services of George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton — were relegated to the old Second Division (although they won promotion back to the First Division at the first attempt). Then, in 1976, they lost in the FA Cup Final to Southampton.

They were back at Wembley a year later, however, and this time won the Cup by beating Liverpool 2-1, thus preventing their Merseyside rivals from achieving a historic treble (First Division title, European Cup and FA Cup). It was United’s first trophy in eight years, and Greenhoff’s greatest moment in a United shirt.

Shortly afterwards the manager, Tommy Docherty, was sacked for having an affair with the club physiotherapist’s wife. He was replaced by Dave Sexton, who preferred Gordon McQueen (bought from Leeds) to Greenhoff at centre-back. United won no more trophies before, in 1979, Greenhoff was sold to Leeds for the then considerable sum of £350,000. In all he had made 271 appearances for United, and scored 17 times.

His time at Elland Road was less distinguished, and he later revealed that he had struggled with his weight. “I put my fingers down my throat a few times,” he told BBC Radio Manchester’s In The Spotlight. “I still enjoyed my weekends — that was the time I used to let my hair down because I’d worked hard for it. At Leeds, they used to weigh us on a Monday morning. I’d have weighed the players on a Friday, because if you’re half a stone overweight on a Friday, you wouldn’t be playing on the Saturday. We didn’t have dietitians in our day. I always ate before a match. I used to have tea, toast and jam. ”

After Leeds were relegated in 1982, Greenhoff left on a free transfer. He played briefly for the South African side Wits University before moving to Bulova SA in Hong Kong during the 1982-83 season. He then turned out for the Finnish team Rovaniemen Palloseura .

In March 1983 his older brother Jimmy (who had played alongside Brian at Old Trafford in the late Seventies) was appointed player-manager at Rochdale, and that December Brian joined him as “player-coach”. He made 16 appearances for the club, but when Jimmy was sacked after only a year, Brian also moved on.

For a time he worked as a sales rep for a sports goods wholesaler in Manchester, visiting stores across the north of England. He later lived with his family in Minorca, taking occasional jobs as a waiter, before finally returning England and settling at Rochdale.

The son of a professional footballer, Brian Greenhoff was born at Barnsley on April 28 1953. He played for Yorkshire Schoolboys and was signed as an apprentice by Manchester United in 1968 (the year the club won its first European Cup). He made his first team debut against Ipswich in September 1973, starting out as a midfielder. It was Docherty who moved him to centre-back, where he developed a fruitful partnership with the Scotland international Martin Buchan.

Buchan later said: “[This] came about more by accident. We were playing Red Star Belgrade in a pre-season friendly when our other centre-back, Jim Holton, twisted his knee in the warm-up and had to be carried off. Tommy Docherty told Brian he was moving from midfield to alongside me in central defence. We were 3-0 down by half-time. However, we came back to recover and that was the start of our partnership. We weren’t the tallest, but we developed an understanding.”

Greenhoff played four times for the England Under-23 side, and won the first of his 18 full England caps against Wales in May 1976.

He is survived by his wife, Maureen, and three sons.

Brian Greenhoff, born April 28 1953, died May 22 2013

Tom Champagne

Tom Champagne, who has died aged 70, became the public face of the British Reader’s Digest as its longest serving and most renowned Prize Draw Manager.

Tom Champagne 

For almost 15 years, Champagne was the “front man” in the selection and presentation of the company’s awards, distributing more than £6 million in prize money to hundreds of winners. It is estimated that his name appeared on close to a billion marketing promotions during that time .

To Reader’s Digest management the unusual surname, of French-Canadian origin, seemed problematic at first: they predicted that no one would believe “Tom Champagne” really existed, and proposed that he adopt a pseudonym for their promotional leaflets. Tom Champagne, however, refused to conceal his identity, and took to carrying his birth certificate as proof that his real name was not the invention of an overenthusiastic copy writer.

Prize winners were not always easy to locate: Champagne sometimes had to track them down as far afield as Australia and the Falklands.

The top prize of £250,000 was given away twice a year at congratulatory lunches. Television celebrities were recruited to hand over the big cheque, but egos were sometimes bruised when it became apparent that the latest lucky winner was keener to meet Tom Champagne than the highly-paid star.

Tom Champagne was born at Reading on January 27 1943, and after his parents separated he was brought up in London by his mother, his Canadian father returning to his homeland.

From the age of 11 he attended Salesian College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Battersea . After leaving education at the age of 18 he worked in publishing .

He met his wife-to-be Jenny at a youth club in Streatham, and in 1975 the couple moved to Canada. They had two sons, but subsequently divorced.

On returning to London in 1980, Champagne joined Reader’s Digest as a credit controller , becoming Prize Draw Manager in the early 1990s. After his retirement in 2003 he was replaced as Prize Draw Manager by Nicholas Shelley. On his BBC radio breakfast show Terry Wogan quipped: “Surely they mean Nicholas Sherry!”

In 2009 Champagne moved to Hoy, Orkney, where he ran a self-catering business with his partner, Nadia, at Cantick Head Lighthouse.

Tom Champagne, born January 27 1943, died May 2 2013

Andrew Simpson

Andrew Simpson, the British Olympic sailor, who has died aged 36, won a gold medal in the Star class at the Beijing Olympics with his best friend Iain Percy and took silver at London 2012.

Top of the world: Andrew 'Bart' Simpson, left, celebrates his Olympic gold medal, won in Beijing, with fellow sailor Iain Percy

Intensely competitive by nature, Simpson’s early years as training partner to Percy and Ben Ainslie did not bring him the success he so desired. He twice failed to qualify for an Olympic place in the one-man Finn dinghy, losing out to Percy in 2000 and to Ainslie in 2004. But his loyalty to his friends and to his sport did not waver. When he and Percy teamed up in the two-handed Star keelboat in early 2007, the result at Qingdao the following year was dramatic.

After a week of still waters, the morning of August 21 2008 dawned to lashing rain and grey skies. Simpson and Percy started the double-points medal race in silver position, just two points behind their Swedish rivals Fredrik Loof and Anders Ekstrom. As the boats’ positions shifted rapidly, at times the outcome seemed to hang in the balance . Percy and Simpson eventually came fifth but, with Sweden finishing behind them, it was enough to secure the gold.

Overall, Beijing saw the most successful haul of medals (four golds, a silver and a bronze) by a British Olympic sailing team in 100 years. With characteristic matter-of-factness, Simpson told the waiting press: “Basically, we knew we’d win this time because we wanted it more than anyone else. It’s a fantastic feeling.”

Born on December 17 1976 in landlocked Chertsey, Surrey, Andrew James Simpson (later known as “Bart”) began sailing at the age of six while visiting his grandparents at Christchurch, Dorset. His father Keith, a member of the Hayling Island Sailing Club, encouraged him from the early years.

Andrew met Iain Percy at the under-16 Optimist nationals in Southampton. They were the youngest competitors, and on one particularly windy day had to remain ashore playing Lego while the older ones took to the water. Percy went on to lap Simpson in the regatta, calling out to him as he passed: “You’re doing really well!” “I thought he was taking the mick,” Simpson recalled. “But it turned out that he was just a nice bloke and wanted to give me encouragement.”

It was while Andrew was sailing around the Dorset coast that he was spotted by Jim Saltonstall, the national racing coach of the Royal Yachting Association. Saltonstall coached Andrew in the National Youth Squad throughout his teenage years at Pangbourne College, Berkshire, and into his time at University College, London.

After graduating with a degree in Economics, Simpson embarked on his professional career. Both he and Percy campaigned the Laser 1 class at the 1996 Olympics, with both losing out on selection to Ainslie. Simpson went on to be Percy’s training partner in the Finn class. In 2001, having missed his chance for Olympic selection the previous year, he took silver at the Finn European Championships, followed by bronze at the ISAF World Championships in 2003. Meanwhile, Iain Percy took a break from Olympic sailing to become a helmsman for the America’s Cup team +39 Challenge. The two joined forces in the Star class on Percy’s return.

After coming home from Beijing, Simpson was appointed MBE.

He joined Team Origin, the British-backed America’s Cup challenger, before once again turning his attention to the Star class for the 2012 Olympics. Despite starting the final race of the men’s Star class with an eight-point lead, Simpson and Percy had to settle for silver behind the Swedish pair .

Following the decision that the Star class would not race in the 2016 Rio Olympics, Andrew Simpson had recently started a business making carbon furniture. Having set his sights on the America’s Cup, he was sailing in San Francisco Bay with the Artemis Racing team, Sweden’s entry in the competition, when its catamaran overturned and he became trapped underneath. All efforts to revive him failed.

He is survived by his wife, Leah, and their two sons.

Andrew Simpson, born December 17 1976, died May 9 2013

Chris Kelly

Chris Kelly, who has died aged 34, was one half of the American hip hop duo Kris Kross, who enjoyed a florescence on the music scene in the early 1990s; they were also responsible for a short-lived vogue among their teenage contemporaries for wearing clothes back to front.

Chris Kelly

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 11 1978, Chris Kelly was only 13 when he was teamed up with his rap partner Chris Smith (they became known as “Mac Daddy” and “Daddy Mac” respectively) by the producer Jermaine Dupri, who signed them to his So So Def label.

Earlier this year, Kelly explained in an interview that he and his fellow 13 year-old Smith decided to wear their trousers back to front in advance of the release of their first single as a means of making themselves stand out from the crowd: “It was kind of a collective idea. We was all just sitting around thinking of something to do different. It probably could have been Jermaine that said, 'Hey, let’s put our pants on backwards’. I was the first one to do it... We went to the mall and got so much attention. We was like, 'OK, this is it’. And it just went from there.”

Their debut single Jump (1992) duly went to No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 and to No 2 in Britain; in the same year their debut album, Totally Krossed Out (1992), sold four million copies in the United States; and their follow-up single Warm It Up (also 1992) made it to No 13 in the Billboard Hot 100.

Kris Kross appeared in music videos for Run-DMC and TLC, and performed alongside Michael Jackson on his Dangerous World Tour in 1992-93. They also sang the Rugrats Rap for the Nickelodeon network.

Their second album, Da Bomb (1993), went platinum. But after releasing the third, Young, Rich & Dangerous, in 1996, the duo split up to pursue solo careers, Kelly going on to work as a producer and establishing his own record label.

In early 2013 Kelly revealed that — more than 20 years after first adopting the practice — he was still wearing his trousers back to front. When asked if this was uncomfortable, he replied: “I don’t know. Everybody always ask me that. But you have to understand I’ve been wearing my pants backwards for 21 years... When I wake up that’s how my pants get put on... And you know people today are like, 'Well, I can’t believe you still wear your pants backwards’. Even if I put on a suit, I put my suit pants on backwards. It’s just a way of life for me.”

Chris Kelly was found dead at his home in Atlanta. A drug overdose is suspected, although the cause is not yet known.

Chris Kelly, born August 11 1978, died May 1 2013

Jeff Hanneman

Jeff Hanneman in 2010. He wrote Slayer's best-known song, Angel of Death. 

Thrash metal, the uncompromising subgenre of heavy metal which focuses primarily on speed and aggression, was given huge publicity in the 1980s by the California foursome Slayer, whose guitarist Jeff Hanneman has died of liver failure aged 49. Alongside his bandmates, Tom Araya (vocals and bass), Kerry King (guitar) and Dave Lombardo (drums), Hanneman was a striking live performer, delivering his guitar solos in an instantly recognisable wailing and atonal style.

Born in Oakland, California, Hanneman was raised in a military household. His father had fought in France in the second world war and his brothers served in Vietnam. After acquiring some Nazi memorabilia from his father, Hanneman began to collect Third Reich souvenirs and continued to do so into adulthood.

Hanneman became a huge fan of hardcore punk music, bringing the speed and ferocity of that movement to Slayer when the group formed in 1981. Their first album, Show No Mercy, was released in 1983. Hanneman flirted briefly with a rock'n'roll lifestyle, as he later recalled: "I used to take a lot of pills – uppers, speed – before I joined the band, and then when we were making the first few albums I used to do coke. But one day we just quit. Tom and I were driving to my girlfriend's parents' house, and I was sticking coke up his nose while he was driving, and I suddenly thought, 'What the hell am I doing?' We both looked at each other and we said, 'No more!' So I just drink alcohol now."

By the late 1980s, Slayer had become one of the "big four" of thrash metal bands, alongside Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax, thanks in part to a record deal with the label Def Jam. The label's owner, Rick Rubin, produced a series of Slayer albums, beginning with their benchmark 1986 release Reign in Blood. Rubin's crisp, reverb-free production perfectly suited the songs' hypnotically fast tempos, lending them a clarity that had been missing from Slayer's previous releases on the independent label Metal Blade.

Reign in Blood opened with what became the band's best-known song,Angel of Death, which was written by Hanneman and concerns the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele's experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the second world war. Hanneman subsequently spent years dismissing allegations of antisemitism.

Despite the extreme nature of some of his songwriting, Hanneman was not an outgoing person by nature, preferring to leave press interviews to other members of the band. When Slayer were off the road, he and his wife, Kathy, whom he married in 1997, entered their dogs in shows as a hobby.

Hanneman's songwriting remained strong throughout the rest of Slayer's career. Evidence of his creative range came with Spill the Blood, a slow, doom-laden song from the 1988 album South of Heaven, and the monstrously speedy Psychopathy Red from World Painted Blood (2009). However, he experienced the occasional dip in quality, notably with the 1998 album Diabolus in Musica. While the album was as musically heavy and lyrically dark as any of Slayer's previous releases, some of its songs entered the downtuned, groove-based style of the then popular nu-metal sound. Fans reacted negatively, and Hanneman later commented: "We do what we do in the moment. Sometimes our albums turn out godlike, and sometimes they turn out lame." Slayer had their biggest chart hit in the US with the 2006 album Christ Illusion, which reached No 5 and featured the Grammy award-winning single Eyes of the Insane, with music composed by Hanneman.

In February 2011 Hanneman was forced to take a temporary leave of absence from Slayer after contracting necrotising fasciitis as a result of being being bitten by a spider in a hot tub. He underwent surgery and required skin grafts. Apart from a guest appearance at a Slayer show in April 2011 in Indio, California, where he played with the sleeve removed from his shirt to reveal the scarring from his surgery, Hanneman spent the next two years out of the public eye.

His wife survives him, along with his brothers, Michael and Larry, and his sister, Kathy.

• Jeff Hanneman, guitar player, born 31 January 1964; died 2 May 2013

Deanna Durbin

Deanna Durbin, who died aged 91, was the best-loved and most fondly remembered singing star of Hollywood’s golden age. Her debut, as an enchanting 14 year-old with a remarkable voice, saved the fortunes of the studio which employed her.

Deanna Durbin 

She blossomed before the cameras into a spirited, light-hearted young woman; her first screen kiss made worldwide news. Then, at 27, her career faltered and she retired to France and a long happy marriage. Her admirers, who were more devoted in Britain than anywhere else, were left with an unfading picture of springtime personified. Her blue eyes, auburn hair and toothsome gaiety won the hearts of filmgoers without resorting to sexuality or coquetry.

Is there anyone, a contemporary critic asked, who doesn’t like a Deanna Durbin film? The answer was no — except for Miss Durbin herself, who came to dislike her screen image as “Little Miss Fixit who bursts into song”.

The daughter of Lancastrian emigrants, Edna Mae Durbin was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on December 12 1921, and moved soon afterwards to Los Angeles. The richness and purity of her voice attracted the attention of a talent scout while she was still at school.

Disney auditioned her for Snow White, but thought she sounded too old. MGM, planning a film — never actually made — about the life of an opera singer, put her under contract, but used her only in a short, Every Sunday, along with another child singer, Judy Garland. Joe Pasternak, a producer at Universal, tried to get Miss Garland for a film about three teenage girls: but MGM kept Judy Garland while dropping Deanna Durbin after six months, so Pasternak took Deanna instead.

By the time the film was released in 1937, she had already become popular in America as a resident singer on The Eddie Cantor Radio Hour: but Three Smart Girls was a sensation. It had been envisaged as just one more minor production from a studio which was faring badly, but a first glimpse of the rushes convinced the studio management that “Universal’s new singing discovery” — as the credit titles described her — offered outstanding potential. The budget was doubled, her part was fattened — and two million dollars flowed back through the box-office. Universal had found a new star.

Since a touch of highbrow music was then fashionable in musical films, Pasternak devised 100 Men and a Girl (1937), in which Deanna persuades Leopold Stokowski to conduct an orchestra of unemployed musicians. Again it was a huge success. Deanna Durbin was now far and away Universal’s most valuable property, and she was paid accordingly: but she remained unspoilt and free of the bumptious characteristics which rendered so many child stars offensive.

A series of carefully crafted vehicles gave her a wide range of songs to sing. They were gentle comedies, usually with a small-town setting and a warmly paternal leading-man. In Mad About Music (1938) she acquired Herbert Marshall as a stepfather; in That Certain Age (1938) she had a schoolgirl crush on Melvyn Douglas; in It’s a Date (1939) she lost Walter Pigeon to Kay Francis, playing her mother. She received a special Academy Award “for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth”.

Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939) proved worthy of its predecessor. First Love (1939), a modern Cinderella story culminating in that famous kiss from Robert Stack, moved her delicately into grown-up romance, a notoriously difficult transition for child stars. Story ingredients and co-stars were, from then on, constantly repeated in slightly differing combinations.

In Spring Parade (1940) she fell for Robert Cummings, who had been in Three Smart Girls Grow Up; and in Nice Girl (1941), maddened by Robert Stack’s failure to respond, she flirted with Franchot Tone.

The Amazing Mrs Holiday (1943) cast her, oddly, as a missionary’s daughter bringing Chinese orphans to San Francisco. Jean Renoir resigned as director, complaining that she was “unable to escape from the style which made her famous”. Nevertheless, she aspired to more serious dramatic roles.

She was indulged with Christmas Holiday (1944), a gloomy piece derived from a Somerset Maugham novel. The misleading title helped to bring audiences into the cinema, but they were indignant at the film’s unsuitability. Neither Durbin’s genuine acting talent nor her rendition of Spring will be a little late this year consoled the public — or the critics. Universal declined to repeat the experiment; a refusal which spurred her growing disillusionment with Hollywood.

Her only colour film was Can’t Help Singing (1945), a comedy Western with an excellent score by Jerome Kern; enjoyable certainly, but her appearance was marred by heavy make-up and blonde ringlets. Lady on a Train was a pleasant little thriller, directed by a Frenchman, Charles David, who five years later became her third husband.

Partly because he could not agree with Universal about the best way to use Deanna Durbin, Joe Pasternak had moved to MGM, to which he always hoped he might one day lure her. Without his guidance, her later films were thin in the extreme, with poor scripts, uninteresting leading men and meagre production values. For a while she was the highest paid female star in Hollywood; the studio claimed that her salary consumed most of the budget, leaving very little for anything else. She said that, whenever she asked for better material, the studio responded by giving her more money.

Inevitably her popularity waned, and she was permanently at loggerheads with the studio. Finally, in 1949, the remainder of her contract was paid off.

There seems no objective reason why her career could not have been relaunched. She had a weight problem, but did not lose her looks. Her voice was just reaching its full maturity. The trouble was that she had come to loathe Hollywood and showbusiness. She no longer wanted to make the kind of films that her public, which held her in peculiarly proprietorial affection, wanted to see.

She had two failed marriages behind her, the first to the producer Vaughan Paul, the second to a German-born screenwriter, Felix Jackson, who produced many of her films. She had wanted to retire at the time of her first marriage, but was persuaded not to do so because in wartime she was needed as a morale-raising entertainer. Now “in a blue funk” about her career and personal life, she determined to leave not only Hollywood but America too. She turned down various possibilities, including My Fair Lady, which was then in the initial stages of conception, because she already had “a ticket for France in my pocket”.

She announced her retirement and, shortly afterwards, married Charles David, who was 16 years her senior. They settled at Neauphle-le-Château, outside Paris.

Unlike many Hollywood stars, she had invested her money sensibly and was a rich woman. But her tastes were simple. She made no public appearances and gave no interviews. Her husband fended off the journalists, and the local people helped to defend her privacy. Occasionally she would slip across the Channel, unrecognised, to visit Glyndebourne. One anomalous event temporarily threatened her seclusion: Ayatollah Khomeini, during his exile in France, came to live nearby.

Occasionally she would watch one of her old films — but only the early ones. Meanwhile, her records, made from the soundtracks, all of which had dropped out of the catalogues, were reissued, and her films were much requested on British television. She did send a message to her British fans, who formed a fan club in 1992, saying that she was “enough of an old man” to enjoy being remembered.

Her husband died in 1999. She had a son from her third marriage and a daughter from her second.

Deanna Durbin, born December 12 1921, died April 2013

Fred ('Nosher’) Powell

Fred ('Nosher’) Powell, who died aged 84, worked as a stuntman on more than 100 films and television series and as a minder for J Paul Getty and Sammy Davis Jr, while portraying himself as a menacing south London “hard man” on the fringes of the underworld.

Nosher Powell (right) with Oliver Reed

Casting himself as a lovable rough diamond — albeit, in his own words, “a big, ugly bastard” — he claimed to have turned down an offer to be the getaway driver on the Great Train Robbery. “As far as I could,” he explained in his memoirs, “I kept my nose clean, but I trod a dangerous line with all the villainy around me.”

During the 1960s, as the bouncer at two popular celebrity haunts in Brewer Street, Soho — Jack Isow’s New York-style deli restaurant and the Jack Of Clubs nightspot in the basement below — Powell kept order in an environment of prostitution, organised crime, protection and drugs rackets, repelling unwelcome incursions. Any trouble was “sorted” by Powell personally in an alley round the corner.

At his front-of-house command post behind bulletproof glass doors Powell, in black tie, was threatened by Maltese mobsters and faced down the Kray Twins when they turned up improperly dressed. He once had to apologise to customers affronted by Orson Welles’s malodorous farts after the great director had gorged himself on the house speciality, potato soup.

Powell’s contacts with regular clients from the film world were soon bringing him casual work as an extra and stuntman . During filming for Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), he was Gert Fröbe’s stunt double, and had to hang by his fingertips from the wing of an upside-down biplane as it swooped above the English Channel .

Later, as a stuntman in Michael Bentine’s It’s A Square World on television, and clad in white tie and tails, he was filmed playing a piano lashed to the deck of a submarine as it dived beneath the Channel. Looking out for terrified runaway horses during filming of the chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959) must have struck Powell as pedestrian by comparison.

Because there were no end-of-film credits for Bond stuntmen, the producers preferring to ignore their existence, Powell was an uncredited stunt double for Sean Connery in From Russia With Love (1963) and for Roger Moore, from his debut as 007 in Live And Let Die (1973) to A View to a Kill in 1985. He also performed stunts for other Bond films, including Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965), and was deafened in one ear by explosions in You Only Live Twice (1967).

In 1987 he starred in Eat The Rich, a black comedy for Channel 4, in which, as a Cockney Home Secretary named Nosher, he dropped out of the sky from a helicopter into a ploughed field in Kent, and urinated against a Palace sentry box after dinner with the Queen. He was astonished when the film became a cult classic.

When Powell took over the Prince of Wales pub behind Wimbledon dog track in the 1970s, he struck up a friendship with the chauffeur to J Paul Getty, then the world’s richest man, and was offered a part-time job looking after the American billionaire’s personal security. The post also involved driving Getty from the West End to his Tudor house, Sutton Place, near Guildford.

With Powell at the wheel of Getty’s Mercedes, the ageing plutocrat would often regale him with business problems. Sometimes, when they had arrived at Sutton Place, Getty would suggest a game of kalooki for modest stakes; Powell invariably won. He eventually left Getty’s payroll because he was expected to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

George Frederick Bernard Powell was born on August 15 1928 in Camberwell, south London. His father was a carter, delivering fish from King’s Cross to Billingsgate market in the middle of the night in a four-wheeler drawn by two Suffolk Punch horses. On account of Fred’s horselike appetite as an infant, his mother called him “Nosher”. The family was bombed out during the war when their house took a direct hit, and he was evacuated to Dorset, where he attended Swanage Grammar School.

On his return to London he started watching boxers in the ring at a derelict chapel opposite a pub in Blackfriars Road, where his father regularly competed in all-comers’ bouts on Sundays (10 shillings for an appearance, £1 for a win). Subsequently, in Jack Solomons’s gym off Shaftesbury Avenue, Fred spent a month as the sparring partner of the American boxer Joe Louis, then world heavyweight champion, who was in Britain for a series of exhibition bouts to entertain GIs.

While still a teenager, in 1944, Fred was offered his first film role, as one of 200 extras cast as knights at Agincourt in Henry V, filmed on Salisbury Plain and starring Laurence Olivier. With his experience of horses from helping his father, he was issued with a mount, lance and shield. A year later, with spear and loincloth, he played a centurion guarding the gates of Rome in the epic Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).

His first substantive job, as a porter at Covent Garden market, was interrupted by National Service. Having boxed with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Egypt, Powell turned professional on demobilisation, fought in some 50 bouts promoted by Jack Solomons — the last being against the Jamaican heavyweight Menzies Johnson in 1959 — and in the 1960s sparred with Muhammad Ali.

Between boxing fixtures, Powell kept up his film work. The director Lewis Gilbert hired him to teach Laurence Harvey to fist-fight for the film Wall Of Death (1951). This led to Powell’s being taken on as the Lithuanian-born actor’s part-time minder in the years before Harvey achieved stardom with Room At The Top in 1959. Powell hid him from the press when the actor was called as a witness at an inquest into the death of a man who had stepped into the path of his Jaguar in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was appearing in As You Like It. When a drunken Harvey assaulted the actress Hermione Baddeley at her flat in Chester Square, Powell called in Henry Cooper’s trainer to tend a disfiguring cut above her eye.

Powell also acted as minder to Frank Sinatra’s son, Frank Jr, on a British singing tour which had to be cancelled when Sinatra Sr turned up in London and heard about his offspring’s philanderings. Sinatra père recommended Powell to Sammy Davis Jr, who hired him as his own minder when he starred in a season at the London Palladium.

Powell’s memoirs, Nosher, were published in 1999. Although these were promoted under the rubric “Stand by for the hardest bastard of them all”, he was latterly complaining to his local paper about nothing more blood-curdling than litter in the street. “Britain has one of the highest crime rates in the world,” he wrote in 2001, “yet I can’t remember the last time I saw a copper walking down my avenue.”

Nosher Powell married, in 1951, Pauline Wellman, with whom he had two sons. The elder, Greg, doubled for Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton in two Bond films. His younger son, Gary, also has a lengthy track record on Bond films, as Pierce Brosnan’s stunt double — driving a runaway crane in GoldenEye (1995) and flipping a boat over in The World Is Not Enough (1999) — and as stunt coordinator in the latest Bond film, Skyfall (2012).

Fred (“Nosher”) Powell, born August 15 1928, died April 20 2013