Alan Hodgkinson, goalkeeper

Hodgkinson in action

Alan Hodgkinson, who has died aged 79, was the youngest goalkeeper capped by England, and after a fine career with Sheffield United became the first specialist coach dedicated to goalkeepers; notably, he recommended Peter Schmeichel to Manchester United.

Hodgkinson’s first club was Worksop Town, which he joined at 16. He made such an impression in a match against local giants Sheffield United that they asked to sign him. Unsure that he had the ability needed of a professional, Hodgkinson hesitated.

He was only persuaded by Worksop’s promise of a tailor-made suit paid from the transfer fee of £250. “Sixty years later, I’m still waiting for it,” he reminisced.

He made his debut for United in 1954 in a friendly against the Scottish team Clyde, and played his first match in the league against Jackie Milburn’s Newcastle the next season. His progress was then interrupted by two years of National Service. By the time he returned to Bramall Lane, the club had been relegated to the Second Division.

Joe Mercer, the new manager, told Hodgkinson, however, that he would be the first choice ’keeper. He had already caught the national selectors’ eye in an Army side which included Bobby Charlton and Duncan Edwards.

He was awarded an under-23 cap, and then in 1957 was named in the England side to play Scotland. Hodgkinson was just 20, and lined up with such elder statesmen of the game as Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews and Billy Wright. Although he suffered a calamitous start when conceding a goal almost from the kick-off, Hodgkinson recovered his poise and the match finished a draw. While it was an era with many good English goalkeepers, Hodgkinson seemed set for a lengthy international career.

Alan Hodgkinson in 1966 with match programmes 

He was in the 1958 World Cup squad, and won four more caps over the next two years. In the event, however, manager Walter Winterbottom tended to prefer the experience of Sheffield Wednesday’s Ron Springett, though Hodgkinson travelled to Chile as reserve for the 1962 World Cup. Ultimately both players were superseded by Gordon Banks.

At less than 5 ft 10 in, Hodgkinson depended not on height but on his positional sense and agility. These he developed with drills on his own devising, training for footballers then consisting of little more than keeping fit.

He would bounce balls off the heavy roller used for Yorkshire’s cricket pitch at Bramall Lane and worked out that he could react quicker by stepping sideways, rather than turning, before flinging himself at a shot. He also realised that the ball travelled further when punted if kicked not at knee but at ankle height.

Insights such as these were beyond the ken of managers then, not that they could not be imaginative. When United’s John Harris wanted to see if Hodgkinson had recovered from an injury, he pulled him into a conference room at a hotel where they were staying and began to hurl at him briefcases he found there.

Hodgkinson turned around to see their owners standing open-mouthed. “Good briefcases,” said Harris laconically, “they’ll last you.”

Hodgkinson played more than 650 matches for Sheffield United, mainly in the top flight following their promotion in 1961, when they also reached the FA Cup semi-final. He lost his place 10 years later, in what proved to be their best season for many a decade, though Hodgkinson was too gentlemanly ever to bemoan the decision.

Alan Hodgkinson was born on August 16 1936 at Laughton Common, near Sheffield. His father was a miner who also gave piano concerts at venues such as Butlin’s. Hodgkinson later recalled the conditions in which he was raised – 47 children in his class, and clean underpants once a week.

He was a talented all-round sportsman, competing at regional level as a gymnast. On leaving school at 15, he became a butcher’s assistant, mainly because it left Saturday afternoons free for football.

After retiring as a player at 35, Hodgkinson offered his services to clubs as a goalkeeping coach, an entirely novel notion. He had spells with teams which included Coventry, Watford, Everton, Aston Villa and Manchester City, combining this with being assistant manager in the 1970s at Gillingham.

Hodgkinson in 2012  

After working with Bobby Robson’s England squad, he was appointed Scotland goalkeeping coach in 1986. His most notable pupil was perhaps Andy Goram.

He later worked for Rangers and for Manchester United. After being sent to see Peter Schmeichel play in Denmark he told Alex Ferguson that he was “the bargain of the century” and predicted that he would help win the title. Hodgkinson also devised the first goalkeeper coaching courses for Uefa.

Alan Hodgkinson was appointed MBE in 2008 and, with Les Scott, wrote a memoir in 2012, Between the Sticks.

He is survived by his wife Brenda, with whom he had two daughters and a son.

Alan Hodgkinson, born August 16 1936, died December 8 2015

Shirley Stelfox

Shirley Stelfox as Edna Birch in Emmerdale in 2007

Shirley Stelfox, the actress, who has died aged 74, appeared in virtually every major soap of the last 50 years, playing several different roles in Coronation Street, Madge Richmond in Brookside, and Melanie Owen’s mother in EastEnders, along with appearances in Crossroads and the short-lived Albion Market. But she was best known for her most recent role as the moralising village busybody Edna Birch in the Yorkshire soap Emmerdale.

The widowed Edna arrived in Emmerdale in 2000, along with with her two beloved dogs Tootsie and Batley, and pudding-basin felt hats, which she was hardly ever seen without. Although prickly and difficult – one reviewer described Shirley Stelfox as “the Ena Sharples of the 21st century” – Edna won sympathy when, the following year, Batley had to be put to sleep, leaving both viewers and actress reaching for their hankies.

At that year’s British Soap awards Batley (aka doggie actor Bracken) won the “Best Exit” award, upstaging Coronation Street’s Amanda Barrie, who had the nation in tears with Alma’s cancer battle.

Shirley Stelfox in 1993

Although Shirley Stelfox was much warmer than her television alter ego, they were both straight-talking and independent, and Shirley was fiercely protective of Edna’s reputation, denying charges that Edna was a monster or a gossip. “Gossips are people who talk behind people’s backs and that’s the last thing Edna does,” she told an interviewer. “She gives it to them straight between the eyes. And I’m not that keen on people calling her an old gossip, either.”

Possibly, also, her sympathy for her character owed something to her own experience of widowhood after her husband, the actor Don Henderson, died at the age of 65.

The youngest of three children, Shirley Stelfox was born at Dukinfield, Cheshire, on April 11 1941 and caught the acting bug as a child, despite suffering from bilateral amblyopia, a condition which meant that she always found it difficult to read small print.

None the less she landed a place at Rada and by the time she began her training she had already made her film debut in an uncredited role in David Lean’s 1954 romantic comedy Hobson’s Choice, with Sir John Mills and Charles Laughton.

Shirley Stelfox, left, with Bernard Cribbins and former Miss World Ann Sidney, 1969   

From Rada, where Edward Fox, John Thaw and Sarah Miles were contemporaries, Shirley Stelfox headed for the BBC, where she landed a role in The Case Before You, a courtroom drama in which she was cast as a 15-year-old arsonist. It was not a great success, she recalled. Her role as the accused required a long pause before she replied to a question, but on the day the usual prompt was replaced by someone else, who thought she must have forgotten her lines and interrupted her pause in an audible stage whisper.

From December 1960, when Shirley appeared in a small role in the first episode of Coronation Street, she was rarely out of work. She returned to the Granada soap in various guises, including as the owner of a dating agency into which Jack Duckworth was comically lured in 1983.

Shirley Stelfox in Stay Lucky  

During her career Shirley Stelfox moved effortlessly from television to theatre to films and back again. As well as appearing in all the major soaps, she appeared in numerous popular television dramas, including The Bill, Bergerac, Inspector Morse and the first series of Keeping Up Appearances, in which she played Hyacinth Bucket’s (Patricia Routledge’s) inexhaustibly randy and embarrassing sister Rose.

Other small screen successes included Wicked Women; Making Out, with Margi Clarke; Heartbeat – in which she played Mrs Parkin – and Jean in Common as Muck.

Her best known film role was as the “$2 prostitute” in the 1984 adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton. She played another prostitute in Personal Services (1987), Terry Jones’s comedy film based on the life of the sex-for-luncheon-vouchers madam Cynthia Payne.

On stage she played the leading role of a stand-up comedienne in Amanda Whittington’s play Stand Up Cherry Pie, directed by June Brown – Dot Cotton in EastEnders – when it premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1993.

By her first husband, Keith Edmundson, Shirley Stelfox had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved after 17 years and in 1979 she married the actor Don Henderson, best remembered as the television detective George Bulman, whose first wife had died in 1977. They spent many happy years together in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shirley helped to bring up her husband’s two young children.

She was devastated when he died from throat cancer in 1997. Subsequently she moved to rural Nottinghamshire.

She is survived by her daughter and her stepson and stepdaughter.

Shirley Stelfox, born April 11 1941, died December 7 2015

Nicholas Smith

NIcholas Smith

Nicholas Smith, who has died aged 81, was the last surviving member of the main cast of the Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft sitcom Are You Being Served?; although a classically trained actor, for millions he will always be the jug-eared Mr Rumbold, the well-meaning but inept manager of Grace Brothers department store.

Smith was picked for the role by Croft, with whom he had worked on an episode of Up Pompeii! with Frankie Howerd. For a time, however, it seemed unlikely that the show (also starring John Inman, Molly Sugden, Frank Thornton and Wendy Richard), would be screened.

“The pilot was only given its chance because of the 1972 Munich Olympics tragedy… With the Games cancelled, the BBC had hours of blank screens to fill. So the pilot was plucked from the shelf,” he recalled.

As the dim-witted but self-important store manager , Smith was a fixture on the show from its inception in 1972 until the final series in 1985. He took the same role in a film adaptation and in a spin-off, Grace And Favour (1992-93), in which five members of the original cast reunited to manage a country hotel.

Smith and the cast of Are You Being Served?  

Many critics disliked the show’s earthy humour and outrageously vulgar double entendres, generally involving the redoubtable purple-haired Mrs Slocombe (Mollie Sugden) and the travails of her celebrated pet cat, always referred to as “my pussy”. But audiences loved it and it won a regular following of up to 22 million per episode.

“People always say Are You Being Served? was from a more innocent time, but although we purposely played it absolutely straight, it was actually fairly filthy,” Smith recalled. “There were various occasions at the first reading of a script when we said, 'We’ll never get away with it’. But David Croft would reply, 'Deliver those lines with complete innocence, as though you haven’t the slightest idea there is any sense of a double entendre’. And it worked... Mary Whitehouse didn’t even complain.”

Smith knew instinctively how to play his character – not overbearingly, but rather as a middle manager who does not know what he is doing but applies endless enthusiasm and energy to doing it and getting it wrong. It was hard to imagine a character less like the urbane and witty actor who played him. For Smith was, among other things, an experienced Shakespearean actor, a published poet and an accomplished musician with an excellent singing voice – the composer of some dozen string quartets and other works.

He admitted, however, that he did not have to try too hard to be Mr Rumbold, recalling that it had been the first role in his life when he was allowed to speak with his own accent and wear his own glasses. The only physical change he needed was turned-up eyebrows, to give Rumbold a perpetually harrassed look. He had no regrets. Are You Being Served? he said, was “something I was proud to be in” .

Smith in Things That Go Bang in the Night, 1972 

Nicholas Smith was born at Banstead, Surrey, on March 5 1934. His father was a chartered surveyor and both parents were keen amateur actors.

Determined to be an actor from an early age, Nicholas took leading roles in school plays and, after National Service in the Royal Army Service Corps in Aldershot (“A miserable time, the worst I’ve had”), trained at Rada, alongside Albert Finney and Richard Briers.

He started off his career in stage musicals, and alongside his television career, spent two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, appeared regularly in rep, on the West End stage, at the Bristol Old Vic and on Broadway, in everything from classical productions to pantomime.

Smith would continue to perform in musical theatre throughout his career, at various times playing the “old gentleman” in a musical production of The Railway Children, giving an acclaimed performance as Alfred Dolittle in My Fair Lady at Cheltenham and taking leading roles Gilbert and Sullivan operettas such as The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance. His film appearances included The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, a 1975 American musical comedy film starring Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman.

His other film credits included Salt and Pepper (1968), A Walk with Love and Death (1969), Mel Brooks’s The Twelve Chairs (1970), and Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972). Most recently, he was the voice of Reverend Clement Hedges in the Wallace & Gromit film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

Smith (left) with fellow cast members Daniel Massey, Gary Bond and Angus Mackay in Granada Television's Wings of Song   

Smith made his television debut in an unscripted role in the 1960s sci–fi series, Pathfinder To Mars. His first speaking role on television was in three episodes of the 1964 Doctor Who series The Dalek Invasion of Earth in which he played Wells, a former slave of the Daleks who helps the Doctor (William Hartnell) lead a rebellion against them.

By the time he was cast as Mr Rumbold, he had appeared in dozens of television series, including The Avengers, The Saint, The Champions, and Z Cars in which he played the uncouth PC Geoff Yates. Later television credits included Worzel Gummidge (as the headmaster Mr Foster);

Martin Chuzzlewit (as Mr Spottletoe); Doctors and Revolver. His last television appearance was in 2010 as Professor Quakermass in the children’s series, MI High.

In 1959, Nicholas Smith married Mary Wall. She died in 2008 and he is survived by their daughter, the actress Catherine Russell, best known for playing Serena Campbell in Holby City.

Nicholas Smith, born March 5 1934, died December 6 2015

Anthony Valentine

Anthony Valentine in Raffles

Anthony Valentine, the actor who has died aged 76, was one of Britain’s best known television baddies, the suave villain of numerous drama series from the 1960s to the 1990s.

He established his reputation as the psychopathic killer Toby Meres in Callan (ITV, 1967-69), became a household name as the sadistic German Luftwaffe officer Major Horst Mohn in the BBC series Colditz (1972-74) and was the gentleman jewel thief and ladies’ man in the Yorkshire Television hit series Raffles (1977).

In a 2002 Radio Times poll Valentine’s Major Mohn was voted the top television rotter of all time. In spite, or perhaps because of, his often sadistic small screen persona, Valentine acquired a fanatical following of female fans. “Girls would write to me, saying things like, 'My husband is away on Friday night. Will you come and beat me up?’ ’’ he once recalled. In 2006 a spokeswoman for a national carpet chain explained that the retailer had stopped using celebrities to open stores after a bizarre incident in the 1970s when Valentine, then starring as Mohn, was scared by a throng of amorous fans. “They were frenzied women. The store’s glass bent,” she recalled. “He was worried what these women would do if they got their hands on him.”

Valentine continued to work into his seventies, appearing as the arch villain George Webster, adept at giving Customs officers the slip, in the hard-hitting Customs and Excise drama The Knock (ITV, 1996). By the time he made his debut in 2009 in Coronation Street as George Wilson, the OAP-about-town with whom Ken Barlow’s acid-tongued mother-in-law Blanche Hunt (Maggie Jones) becomes smitten, he had shed most of his villainous persona, if not his power to charm.

Valentine as Major Mohn, left, in Colditz  

Anthony Valentine was born on August 17 1939 at Blackburn, Lancashire, where his parents worked in a cotton mill. When he was six the family moved to London where he was educated at Acton County Grammar School.

He made his acting debut as a 10-year-old as a “little boy” in the film No Way Back (1949), and aged 12 was a youthful sleuth in The Girl on the Pier (1953). He went on to appear in several BBC children’s television shows, most notably as Captain of the Remove Harry Wharton, one of the Fat Owl’s chums in the BBC’s long-running Billy Bunter series (1952-61) .

But he came into his own as Edward Woodward’s fellow Secret Service agent and rival Toby Meres in the first two series of Callan, a character he brought to life as a supercilious upper-class thug whose urbane demeanour somehow fails to conceal his total lack of moral compass. The series was created in 1967 by James Mitchell as an antidote to the more glamorous The Saint and The Avengers (in which Valentine had also appeared).

With its distinctive title sequence showing a swinging lightbulb exploding in slow motion at the sound of a gunshot, it took a while to gain a following, but eventually became one of television’s most popular dramas. Meres departed for a posting in the US when Valentine left to appear in the espionage thriller Codename on the rival BBC network.

Anthony Valentine in 1977 

Valentine’s other television credits included Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Softly Softly, Lovejoy, The Detectives, Tales of the Unexpected and Robin of Sherwood (ITV 1984-86), in which he played the nobleman and master of the black arts Baron de Belleme. He also appeared frequently in the West End in shows including No Sex Please, We’re British, Sleuth and Half a Sixpence, and in a number of films, including Escape to Athena (1979) and, notably, Performance (1970), in which he played Joey Maddocks, the London betting shop owner.

The role of Meres established Valentine as television producers’ suave British baddie of choice, and as such he might have chosen a career in Hollywood. But after making a pilot episode of NBC’s The Fifth Corner as a gangster called “The Hat”, he turned down the chance of Hollywood stardom to avoid being parted from his wife, the actress Susan Skipper, whom he married in 1982.

The couple had first met on the set of Raffles and then appeared together three years later on the television film of Ivor Novello’s show The Dancing Years. In an interview in 1995, Valentine recalled that he had experienced two brushes with death – once aged 26 when he was struck down by meningitis and doctors thought he would die, the second time in 1974, when he was caught up in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and holed up in a holiday hotel as gun battles raged outside. “I’ve always felt that everything since has been an incredible bonus,” he said. In 2012, however, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

His wife survives him.

Anthony Valentine, born August 17 1939, died December 2 2015

Jonah Lomu, rugby player

Lomu performing the Haka in 1999 

Jonah Lomu, who has died aged 40, was rugby union’s first global superstar and arguably the greatest player ever to grace the game; his giant frame – 6ft 5ins and close to 19 stone in his prime – allied with the pace of a sprinter who had beaten 11 seconds in the 100 metres, made him a formidable force as left wing three-quarter for New Zealand.

He played 63 times for the All Blacks, scoring 37 tries. The most memorable of these was one of four he scored against England in the semi-final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, bullocking his way not just past but over and through defenders on his way to the line. The England captain, Will Carling, said ruefully: “He is a freak and the sooner he goes away the better.”

Lomu pushes off England's Jeremy Guscott in 1999 

Lomu, then only 19, had been a surprise choice for the New Zealand World Cup squad, having won only two caps with inauspicious performances in defeats against France. But the All Blacks coach, Laurie Mains, had seen something special in Lomu’s unstoppable displays at the Hong Kong sevens, where he had run round Australia’s great winger, David Campese.

He decided to take a gamble on the inexperienced Tongan, a bold decision that was vindicated by the seven tries he scored in the tournament. With the eight tries he went on to score in 1999, Lomu is joint holder with South Africa’s Bryan Habana of the record for try-scoring in Rugby World Cups.

A remarkable aspect of Lomu’s career is that he performed all his great feats on the rugby field while suffering from a serious kidney disease. Although this was identified as nephritic syndrome only in 1996, when he was 21, he had felt the debilitating effects long before and had always had to retire to bed after a game rather than go out on the town with his colleagues. “Imagine what I could have done healthy,” he once remarked.

Although the All Blacks, weakened by a bout of food poisoning, had gone on to lose that 1995 World Cup final to South Africa, Lomu almost won the game for them with a devastating run that beat several defenders, but was halted close to the line by a despairing tackle from the Springbok scrum-half, Joost van der Westhuizen.

At the recent World Cup in London there was a moving scene when the two men greeted each other 20 years after the event – the former All Black with his ongoing kidney ailment and the former Springbok in a wheelchair suffering from the late stages of motor neurone disease. Lomu, always a generous man, never resented the loss of the World Cup, recognising that it was a historic moment in South Africa’s history.

Lomu had a kidney transplant in 2004 but went on playing at various levels of the game until 2007. By 2011, however, the transplant was failing and for the last four years of his life he was on dialysis for six hours every other day.

His emergence as a superhero at the 1995 World Cup, where he was declared Player of the Tournament, coincided with rugby union’s formal move into professionalism. His fame had an immense commercial impact. One effect was to persuade Rupert Murdoch that rugby held sufficient attraction to viewers to justify investing millions of dollars in the television rights.

Jonah Tali Lomu was born to Tongalese parents in Pukekohe, a poor area of Auckland, on May 12 1975. He was taken to Tonga by his parents when he was young to keep him out of trouble after a cousin had been stabbed in a street gang fight in Pukekohe. He later returned to attend Wesley College in Auckland, where he excelled in rugby and athletics.

Jonah Lomu in 1999

He started his career as a back-row forward before switching to the wing, which he described as “the best move I could have made.” He was the first of the giant wingers who are now a common feature of the game. He was chosen for New Zealand’s under-19s and under-21s before becoming the youngest ever All Black at 19 years and 45 days.

He played for numerous clubs at various stages of his career, including Auckland Blues, the Chiefs and the Hurricanes, North Harbour and Cardiff Blues. He won a gold medal with New Zealand sevens at the 1998 Commonwealth Games and was later inducted into the International Rugby Board’s Hall of Fame. He gave his name to several rugby video games.

Lomu married three times. In 1996 he married Tanya Rutter, a South African, with whom he lived for four years before they were divorced. He married his second wife Fiona in a secret ceremony on Waiheke Island in 2003. They divorced in 2008 after he had an affair with Nadene Quirk, causing tension with her then husband, a rugby player who had married her only 10 months before.

In 2012 the couple became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They had two boys, Brayley and Dhyveille, now aged six and four. Lomu’s famous tries from 1995 have been often replayed this year on the 20th anniversary. “When they show clips of me on TV, my boys turn to look at me,” Lomu proudly observed.

He died suddenly from a heart attack the day after returning from a promotional tour in England. His death brought warm tributes from many figures in the game, past and present, hailing him as the greatest of players and the most gentle of men. The former All Black player Ant Strachan recalled on the Today programme that Lomu would often say a small prayer before a match to the effect that “he didn’t want to hurt anyone in terms of any significant injury”. Lomu certainly had hurt a few players, Strachan conceded, “but there was no malice in it.”

Jonah Lomu, born May 12 1975, died November 18 2015

Saeed Jaffrey, actor

Jaffrey in 1979 

Saeed Jaffrey, who has died aged 86, was regarded as the best-known Indian actor in Britain as well as a much admired British actor in India; small, dapper, and youthful, with immaculate swept-back hair and a glint of worldly cunning in his eyes, he had a gift for portraying the less attractive human characteristics – self-importance, greed, slyness – with an emotional expressiveness which always won audiences’ sympathy.

He made some 100 films in India, starting with Satyajit Ray’s classic The Chess Players (1977) in which he played one of two chess-obsessed 19th-century noblemen who carry on with the game as their Indian state of Oudh is annexed by the British. He was best known to Western cinema audiences for his roles as Sardar Patel in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982); Billy Fish in John Houston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Hamidullah in David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984) and Nasser, the Thatcherite Pakistani businessman, in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), for which he won a Bafta nomination.

Jaffrey had first made his name in Britain in Gangsters (1975-78), the BBC One drama series that first brought multi-racial Britain to a mainstream audience, and in which black and Asian actors were given opportunities to play both heroes and villains. It turned Jaffrey, who played the urbane gangster and “community leader” Rafiq, into a household name.

He went on to star in many other television series, including Staying On (1980) with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson; The Jewel in the Crown (1984, as the Nawab of Mirat); The Far Pavilions (1984) with Omar Sharif and Sir John Gielgud, and the Channel 4 sitcom Tandoori Nights (1985-87). In 1998 he was memorable as Ravi Desai, the corner shop owner in Coronation Street .

Jaffrey in The Jewel in the Crown in 1984

As Jaffrey revealed in An Actor’s Journey (1998), the demands of a busy acting career did not prevent him from enjoying a colourful private life. His publishers had been expecting a book of sedate recollections about his experiences working with famous directors. What they got was a “bonk-fest” (including an account of how he acquired membership of “the mile-high club” on the London-Edinburgh shuttle with an American stranger), some of which was considered too salacious and had to be cut.

The eldest of four children, Saeed Jaffrey was born in Malerkotla, Punjab, on January 8 1929 to what he described as “rather good aristocratic Mogul stock”. His childhood was spent on the move as his father, a medical officer in Uttar Pradesh, went from post to post. “I was exposed to a Muslim school, so I learnt Urdu. I was exposed to a Hindu school, so I learnt Hindi. I was exposed to a Church of England school, so I got my Senior Cambridge certificate,” he recalled.

His acting career began when, after obtaining a Master’s degree in History at Allahabad University, he joined All-India Radio, through which he met his first wife, the actress Madhur Bahadur, who would become famous as the television cook Madhur Jaffrey, and with whom he had three daughters. He went on to form his own English theatre company in Delhi, putting on productions of Shakespeare. He then went to America as a Fulbright scholar to take a Master’s degree in Drama at the Catholic University of America, Washington DC. There he became the first Indian actor to tour Shakespeare, and the first to appear on Broadway – as Professor Godbole in A Passage to India, opposite Dame Gladys Cooper.

Jaffrey in Adventures of Black Beauty in 1973   

In his autobiography Jaffrey recounted how during his marriage to Madhur Jaffrey he had resorted to striptease clubs because he was “tremendously sexually charged” but did not want to be unfaithful. Such heroic abstinence did not last and in 1966 she left him after he had enjoyed a “brief but passionate” affair with a dancer. There followed, he recalled in an interview, “a rather divine period... when I decided I would please as many women as possible. Then, I think it was 21 ladies in 21 nights.”

He also moved to Britain, where he found a job with the BBC World Service, for whom he wrote and broadcast hundreds of scripts in Hindi, Urdu and English. His first appearance in the West End was as Brahma, in Kindly Monkeys, and he went on to appear in many other productions, starring with Margaret Lockwood and Siobhan Mckenna in On A Foggy Day, and was featured in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, with Ingrid Bergman.

While it was Gangsters that made his name, Jaffrey recalled the most important day of his life as August 15 1985: “the day My Beautiful Laundrette was 'discovered’ by critics at the Edinburgh Festival [and] also that on which Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili began an 18-month run across India that made me a household name in the land of my birth.” He enjoyed fame, he confessed, “especially when teenage girls squeal, blow me kisses and say 'you are the most adorable cutie-pie in the industry’. I love that.”

Jaffrey in 1999 

Jaffrey had mostly happy memories of his film work except for A Passage to India, whose director. David Lean, had not only reduced Dame Peggy Ashcroft to tears, but “cut my part in two and gave the other half to Art Malik, a north Londoner who had to put on a phoney accent.” Jaffrey’s own ear for accents brought him many commissions on BBC Radio Four, including The Pump, with Sir Michael Redgrave, in which he played nine roles . In 1997 the World Service broadcast Saeed’s serialisation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, in which he played all 86 characters.

He was appointed OBE in 1995.

In 1980 Saeed Jaffrey married, secondly, Jennifer Sorrell, a casting agent, who survives him with the three daughters of his first marriage.

Saeed Jaffrey, born January 8 1929, died November 15 2015

Cynthia Payne, madam

Cynthia Payne in 1991

Cynthia Payne, who has died aged 82, became Britain’s best-known brothel keeper when police raided her suburban home in Streatham, south London, in 1978, interrupting a sex party that was in full swing; at her trial, she was ineradicably branded “Madam Cyn” and imprisoned for 18 months for running “the biggest disorderly house” in British history.

A rapt media feasted on stories of middle aged and elderly men queuing up in SW16 to exchange “luncheon vouchers” for food, drink, conversation, striptease shows, and a trip upstairs with the girl of their choice. Businessmen, vicars, MPs, lawyers and even, reportedly, a peer were among those who considered Cynthia Payne the best hostess in London. Jeffrey Bernard in The Spectator declared her “the greatest Englishwoman since Boadicea”.

On appeal, Cynthia Payne’s sentence was reduced to six months and a hefty fine. She was unrepentant, however, and on her release from prison she resumed her parties until the police called again in 1986.

Such attention gave Mrs Payne the chance to entertain the nation with her outspoken views on men and sex and, more seriously, to confront the contradictions and shortcomings of the British laws on prostitution.

Detectives who raided her detached Edwardian home at 32 Ambleside Avenue in December 1978 found 53 men huddled in the hall. Most were queuing on the stairs leading up to the bedrooms, and were clutching vouchers to be redeemed for sex; some appeared to have come straight from the office. Of the 13 women on the premises, some were completely naked.

Jeffrey Bernard declared her 'the greatest Englishwoman since Boadicea'

Judge David West-Russell noted, however, that Mrs Payne had appeared in court on four previous occasions, on similar charges. As well as sending her to jail, he fined her a total of £1,950 and ordered her to pay costs of up to £2,000.

The public was as shocked by the sentence as Cynthia Payne herself, and a national debate ensued. Thirty MPs of all parties – among them Sam Silkin, the previous Labour attorney-general, and Tony Benn – signed a Commons motion deploring her imprisonment. They added that she posed no threat to the community, and advocated the prosecution of her male customers.

Cynthia Payne was born in Bognor Regis on Christmas Eve 1932. (The correct spelling of her name was disputed and may originally have been Paine, but she settled on Payne.) Her father, Hamilton, was away at sea for much of her childhood, running the hairdressing salon on board the Durban Castle, a liner on the South Africa run.

Cynthia Payne (right) with Julie Walters to celebrate the launch of the comedy film Personal Services

Her mother died of throat cancer in 1943 when Cynthia and her sister Melanie were still young; the two girls were brought up by a series of housekeepers hired by their father. Expelled from school for being “a bad influence” (a cousin recalled she never stopped talking about sex), Cynthia was enrolled by her father on a hairdressing course at a technical college in London, but she was asked to leave because of her lack of interest. An apprenticeship with some hairdressing friends of her father in Aldershot proved equally fruitless; they insisted she saw a psychiatrist to cure her compulsive swearing, and after claiming falsely that she was pregnant and threatening to swallow weedkiller, Cynthia was disowned by her father.

Back in Bognor in 1950, aged 17, she took a job at a bus garage where she began an affair with a married man (a period dramatised in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here). Her lover followed her when she moved to Brighton to work as a waitress and then to London, where Cynthia Payne fell pregnant. A son, Dominic, was born, followed – as a result of another affair – by a second son who was put up for adoption.

When she was 22, Cynthia Payne met an amusement arcade operator from Margate with whom she lived for five years. After her third illegal abortion (the man scorned contraception), she left him and embarked on the career change that would make her name.

Holding down her day job as a waitress in a London café, she rented four small flats which she sublet to working prostitutes. She hit on this idea as the result of a chance meeting in the café with a prostitute who offered her £3 a week to use her room in the evenings. Cynthia Payne quickly realised the profitable potential of such an arrangement (this sum was twice her weekly wage as a waitress); she became a prostitute’s maid at her network of flats, opening the door and answering the phone to clients, and when the girls failed to pay the rent on time, decided to try her hand at “the game” herself.

Cynthia Payne with Lord Longford  

She spent two years working as a prostitute before opening her own brothel. With savings, an inheritance from her mother and help from a boyfriend, she managed to put a deposit on a small terraced house in Edencourt Road, Streatham. Her clients there included her own son Dominic, deflowered by one of her girls as a 16th birthday present.

In 1974, she paid £16,000 for a much bigger house called Cranmore in Ambleside Avenue, not far from Streatham’s notorious Bedford Hill red light area. Its unusual features included an instruction signed “Madam Baloney” forbidding sex in the bathroom, and a sign in the kitchen proclaiming “My house is clean enough to be healthy… and dirty enough to be happy”.

Cynthia Payne bought Cranmore with financial help from her devoted friend and “sex-slave” Squadron Leader Robert “Mitch” Smith, with whom she lived until his death in 1981. He was “a bit of a kink”, she once testified in court “who liked to be caned and whipped”. The house was furnished in a style of overwhelming suburban ordinariness, with nets at the windows, starched antimacassars and plenty of pretty china.

Sensing that her widowed father (with whom she had been reconciled) was missing the company of women, she let him have the run of her house – and the girls. “I can see now why men like coming here, Cinders,” he once commented from the depths of one of her red Dralon sofas. “It’s because when you look round, you don’t feel you are in a brothel.”

Her regulars included a night watchman, a vicar with a penchant for plump angels, and a barrister who would change into high heels and stockings

She drummed up business by word of mouth, and by distributing her calling card, signed Cynthia Payne LV (Luncheon Vouchers). She barred men under 40 (“all Jack-the-lads boasting about their prowess”); her regular clients included a night watchman in his sixties who availed himself of a special £5 discount for pensioners, a vicar with a penchant for plump angels, an exhibitionist professor, and a barrister who would arrive as if dressed for court, then change into a full tart’s costume of extra high heels, black stockings and make-up.

“We had a high-class clientele,” Cynthia Payne recalled many years later, “no rowdy kids, no yobs, all well-dressed men in suits, who knew how to respect a lady. It was like a vicar’s tea party with sex thrown in – a lot of elderly, lonely people drinking sherry.”

Cynthia Payne and her girls provided a wide range of personal services, to satisfy the requirements of the most exotic male fantasies. She understood completely when one of her clients revealed his penchant for polishing a woman’s shoes while she was still wearing them, and always kept her own high heels and cane by her door to please others. At the same time, as the fastidious and orderly proprietor of a disorderly house, she took a motherly interest in the welfare of her staff: each girl would end the afternoon’s work with a snack of poached egg on toast and a hot cup of tea.

Having served two-thirds of her sentence, Cynthia Payne emerged from Holloway in 1980 as a fully fledged media madam, and was driven to a south London hotel in a supporter’s Rolls-Royce for a champagne reception.

Cynthia Payne leaving Holloway Prison in 1980 with her pet dog Sandy. 

In 1983, the News of the World revealed that “the luncheon voucher queen has put sex back on the menu” by resuming her famous parties. This time, Cynthia Payne claimed she was not charging money but leaving clients to make their own arrangements with the women. But according to one guest, nothing much had changed: it began as “an ordinary cocktail affair with … polite chatter about politics and gardening.

“Suddenly, three scantily-clad attractive girls came dancing into the room and went round kissing everybody and greeting guests like old friends.” Normal service had resumed at Ambleside Avenue.

Her celebrity career prospered. The novelist Paul Bailey wrote her biography An English Madam (1982) and Terry Jones directed a film about her life, Personal Services (1986), in which she was played by Julie Walters.

Meanwhile, the police were still watching. Although Cynthia Payne insisted she no longer ran a brothel, she did admit to throwing “an occasional swinging party”. It was at such a celebration to mark the end of filming Personal Services that detectives raided her home for a second time in 1986.

In an atmosphere of barely subdued mirth, the resulting court case in January 1987 made more headlines and kept the nation amused for 13 days with lurid tales of sex, slaves, transvestites and undercover policemen in disguise. In the end, Cynthia Payne was cleared on nine charges of controlling prostitutes.

She left the court clutching a Laughing Policeman doll which she had kept as a mascot throughout the trial. This time the champagne corks were popped in a suite at the Waldorf. Later she sent Judge Brian Pryor QC a copy of An English Madam, with the inscription: “I hope this book will broaden your rather sheltered life.”

The Conservative MP Anthony Beaumont-Dark thought the case had made fools of the police. “People are wondering why squads of policemen are launching punitive raids on a bit of harmless fun,” he added, “rather than getting on with the real job of hammering rapists, burglars and muggers.”

Another maverick Tory, Nicholas Fairbairn MP, thought Mrs Payne should have been mentioned in the Honours List for keeping the nation amused. If the police would concentrate on matters of national importance, he told The Daily Telegraph, “they would be spending their time more usefully than prosecuting a jokey English lady who has made us laugh during a cold winter.”

Cynthia Payne electioneering for the Payne and Pleasure Party in 1988 

Following her second trial, Cynthia Payne determined to change what she considered to be Britain’s archaic sex laws. She stood for Parliament as a candidate for the Payne and Pleasure Party in the Kensington by-election in July 1988 and again in Streatham in the 1992 general election. Her stated aim was “to provide light relief, to whip up support and to raise funds”.

Later that year, Cynthia Payne completed a three week season at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival playing to packed houses. She became an accomplished after-dinner speaker, particularly at police conferences . In 2004 she raised £325 from an auction of memorabilia, including a French maid’s outfit, a mink coat, and a projector used to show blue films. In 2006 she re-launched her range of sex toys and raunchy outfits on the internet. “These days I am still in demand,” she said, “but in a different way. In my thirties I was doing it, in my forties I was organising it and now, unfortunately, I can only talk about it.”

Latterly Cynthia Payne lived quietly at Ambleside Avenue with her secretary and adviser Gloria Walker. Although always known as Mrs Payne, she never married.

Cynthia Payne, born December 24 1932, died November 15 2015

Warren Mitchell

Warren Mitchell

Warren Mitchell, who has died aged 89, was the actor who created the monstrous Alf Garnett; the balding bigot with his Kipling moustache and West Ham scarf became the vehicle for some of the most iconoclastic satire ever seen on television.

Indeed, so believable was Mitchell in the role that he was regularly congratulated on his views by those members of the pubic who were precisely the target of him and writer Johnny Speight.

The character first appeared in 1965 as “Alf Ramsey” in a one-off BBC play by Speight. Mitchell, not yet 40, was the third choice for the part; the first was Peter Sellers. Alf’s convictions were made apparent from the first line as he looked as his watch while Big Ben struck 10: “That blaaady, Big Ben… fast again.” A series, Till Death Us Do Part, began the next year and ran until 1975.

Each week, from his armchair, docker Alf would treat all within earshot to his substantial prejudices, his favoured topics being race, permissiveness, feminism and the monarchy. Particular ire was reserved for the long hair of his son-in-law and for Edward Heath, the prime minister, for not having attended a “proper” school such as Eton.

Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett (right) in the comedy series Till Death Us Do Part with Anthony Booth as son in law Mike, Una Stubbs as daughter Rita and Dandy Nichols as Else during the recording of an episode of the show The plotting was thin and much of its success was due to the ensemble playing of the cast, notably Dandy Nichols as his wife Else – the “silly moo” – Una Stubbs as daughter Rita and Tony Booth as her abrasive husband. As satire it struck only one note, but its power lay in guilty laughter, in exposing to view what many Britons secretly thought. Those, like Mary Whitehouse, who complained about the bad language either missed the point of caricature, or did not want to hear.

The programme spawned two films and a stage production, The Thoughts of Chairman Alf, and was transplanted, in milder form, to Germany and America as All in the Family. It was revived between 1985 and 1990 as In Sickness and in Health, but Alf’s views now seemed dated and peevish rather than disturbing.

Mitchell was born Warren Misell at Stoke Newington, London, on January 14 1926. His grandparents were Russian Jews who had emigrated to Britain in 1910 and were involved in the fish trade. His father, a china and glass merchant, was so orthodox that he would later refuse to meet Mitchell’s wife, the actress Connie Wake, because she was not a Jew. He only relented when she took the part of a Jewish girl in a play.

Young Warren was influenced more by his mother, who fed him bacon at Lyons Corner House and took him to performances by Max Miller or The Crazy Gang. Is faith was dealt a further blow when he played football for his school First XI on Yom Kippur instead of fasting and was not immediately struck dead. He celebrated with egg and chips and was thereafter a fervent opponent of dogma and tradition.

Warren Mitchell with Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan rehearse for the BBC One show Up The Polls in 1970

He was educated at Southgate County School and in 1944 went up to University College, Oxford as an RAF cadet to read Physical Chemistry. His mother had sent him to singing and dancing lessons since he was seven and he soon fell into dramatic company in Oxford, making friends with Richard Burton. His studies were ended in 1945 when the pair were sent for air training in Canada, where Burton’s ability to impress girls by declaiming Shakespeare convinced Mitchell to take up acting. He was accepted by Rada in 1947.

He struggled to find work on leaving and was employed first as a porter at Euston Station and then making ice cream at the Walls factory. He made his first professional appearance at the Finsbury Park Open Air Theatre in 1950 and met his wife soon after while at the Unity Theatre. A spell standing in as a disc jockey on Radio Luxembourg prompted him to change his name when told he needed one “people could write in to”.

Warren Mitchell and wife Connie at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in 2003  

His break came when appearing on Hancock’s Half Hour, then transmitted live. When Tony Hancock dried on one occasion, Mitchell was quick-witted enough to fill for him while he recovered. A grateful Hancock gave him a regular role, often as an indeterminate, peculiar foreigner. Mitchell’s dark complexion also secured him numerous small roles as ethnic types in films from 1954, when he made his debut in The Passing Stranger. He had appeared in nearly 40 films, including the Beatles picture Help! and with Burton in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold before his apotheosis as Alf Garnett.

He continued to perform in the theatre and surprised many who had overlooked, amidst Alf’s bigotry, the quality of Mitchell’s acting. He was particularly drawn to playing life’s losers. In 1979 his Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the National Theatre brought him an Evening Standard Theatre award and an Olivier. Sir Peter Hall said it was one of the finest half-dozen pieces of character acting he had seen. Mitchell also appeared at the National in The Caretaker and in a tour of Pinter’s The Homecoming in 1991.

He played the miser Harpagon in Moliere’s play at Birmingham, although the critics felt his stab at King Lear in 1995 to be underpowered. He had more success as an excellent Shylock, both in 1981 BBC television production of The Merchant of Venice and for Radio Four in 1996.

He appeared in several other unmemorable films but despite increasing ill health in his later years he found his best roles on television and stage. In So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, a BBC series in 1991, he played Ivan Fox, a Jewish businessman caught in the religious crossfire of Belfast, and in the BBC’s ambitious adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast in 2000 he played the vicious bearded dwarf Barquentine.

Warren Mitchell in 2000  

On stage, he won a second Olivier award in 2004 for his role as the crotchety Yiddish furniture dealer, Solomon, in Arthur Miller’s The Price; he carried on with the run despite having suffered a mild stroke. His performance, aged 82, in Visiting Mr Green (again, playing an elderly Jewish man) in the West End was described by the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer as “incredibly touching”.

Mitchell lived in Hampstead but was a regular visitor to Australia, frequently appearing on the Sydney stage, and in 1989 he took dual Australian-British citizenship, saying he preferred its egalitarian culture to the hidebound structure of British society. He could be forceful, even aggressive, company, always seeing himself as something of an outsider. He loathed what he considered to be the cautious mediocrity of contemporary television, believing that “you can’t be funny unless you offend people. Comedy comes from conflict, from hatred.”

He had a wide range of interests, from playing the clarinet to sailing and yoga. Several hip operations made him more implacable at the tennis net, but he had to give up the game after developing transverse myelitis, a nerve condition. His chief passion was Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, first attending a game aged five. Fans were always astonished that Alf Garnett was among them rather than at West Ham.

He married Constance Wake in 1952; she survives him with two daughters and a son.

Warren Mitchell, born January 14 1926, died November 14 2015