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

Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor, drummer

Phil 'Philthy Animal' Taylor in the mid-1980s

Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, who has died aged 61, was the former drummer of Motörhead, the unsavoury-looking heavy metal band which established a reputation for playing, and living, louder, faster and harder than anyone else.

The band was formed in 1975 by its lead singer and guitarist Lemmy (real name Ian Kilmister), after he had been kicked out of the LSD-addled psychedelic band Hawkwind owing to pharmaceutical differences (Lemmy preferred amphetamines).

The original line-up featured guitarist Larry Wallis and drummer Lucas Fox, but within a year Lemmy had replaced them with “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor – “Philthy” for short.

Philthy and Lemmy had hit it off immediately when the drummer gave Lemmy a lift to the recording studios where the original Motörhead line-up were rehearsing their first album. They stayed up all night, and in the morning Taylor staggered outside, stark naked, declaring to anyone who might be watching: “It’s all right, I’m on drugs!” “What a horrible little ----,” observed Larry Wallis. “He’s perfect.”

Motorhead in Port Vale in 1981: (l-r) Lemmy Kilmister, 'Fast' Eddie Clarke and 'Philthy' Taylor    

Originally christened “Bastard”, they changed their name to Motörhead (after an anthem in praise of amphetamines that Lemmy had written for Hawkwind), having being persuaded that the original name would prevent them ever appearing on Top of the Pops. The name also served as an impetus for the band’s characteristic brand of amped–up “aggro-music”.

Described as “the worst band in the world”, Motörhead recorded an album for United Artists, only for the label to deem it unreleasable (until they became successful, at which point it was rushed out as On Parole). They were set to split, and planned to record a live album at their farewell show, but Ted Carroll of the independent label Chiswick Records failed to turn up with the recording equipment.

In compensation, Carroll offered them a couple of days’ recording time, during which Motörhead completed their eponymous debut album – issued in 1977. The album did well enough to persuade the band to stay together, but it would be their next LP, Overkill (1979), that marked their real breakthrough – its title track was later described by one rock journalist as “one of the most important tracks in metal history, and arguably rock history.” By 1981, when their ferocious live album, No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, went straight to the top of the album charts, Motörhead were established as the most popular group in Britain.

Motorhead in 1982: (l-r), 'Philthy Taylor', 'Fast' Eddie Clarke and Lemmy 

Motörhead came to be cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest band ever, and the group were so proud of their ear-splitting reputation and rock’n’roll excess (they were said to have inspired the movie Spinal Tap) that Lemmy once claimed: “If we moved in next door to you, your lawn would die.”

Taylor provided the key element in the band’s head-banging, supercharged, distorted rhythmic sound, his frenetic double bass-drum barrage helping to define a new genre: “thrash” metal (although Taylor himself claimed that he only associated “thrash” with “what your dad did to you when he took his belt off”). His performance on the cymbals was described by one reviewer as “like a million ants with taps on their feet running across a metal picnic table”.

'Philthy' Taylor on stage in 1981  

Taylor’s nickname aptly summed up the band’s ethos and he himself was notorious for never having a wash while on tour. He was also one of the few Motörhead alumni able to match Lemmy’s heroic intake of intoxicating substances.

In his autobiography, White Line Fever (2002), Lemmy recalled an occasion in 1980 when, after a gig in Belfast, Taylor had been drunkenly playing “Who can lift each other highest” with a large Irishman on a stone staircase.

“The Irishman lifted Phil up the highest and at the same time took a step back to admire his work – into thin air,” leaving Taylor with a broken neck. When the drummer emerged from hospital wearing a brace, Lemmy recalled, “I cut a bow tie out of black gaffer tape and stuck it on the front so that he looked like a Spanish waiter with a goitre.”

“Phil’s done a lot of stuff besides that,” Lemmy went on to observe, in a masterly piece of understatement. “We were going to do a book called Hospitals I have Known Across Europe by Phil Taylor – a guide to European emergency rooms.” One US tour was dubbed the “Motörhead casualty tour” after Taylor badly bruised his ribs falling over on the tour bus while drunk.

'Philthy' Taylor strikes a characteristic pose  

Motörhead went through a number of changes in line-up over the years. The guitarist Eddie Clarke left the group in 1982 during a tour of the US in protest at Lemmy’s version of Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man, a collaboration with the punk-metal singer Wendy O Williams, which he felt had betrayed Motörhead’s core principles.

Taylor resigned in 1984 but, typically, could not remember why, recalling that “there weren’t any fights or problems like that”. (Lemmy later made a pointed comment about a heavy metal band Taylor was going to form “which was going to be, but wasn’t, much better than Motörhead”).

His place was taken by Pete Gill, but, as Lemmy later admitted, though at least as good a drummer as Taylor, Gill “didn’t fit in image-wise, from the personality point of view”. There was relief all round when Taylor returned to the band in 1987. “The Animal’s back in the zoo,” declared Lemmy.

Taylor remained with Motörhead for a further five years, but was fired in 1992 during the recording of the March or Die album after failing to learn the drum tracks on the song I Ain’t No Nice Guy, and after several warnings that he needed to “get his act together”.

Philip Taylor was born on September 21 1954, at Hasland near Chesterfield. After replacing Motörhead’s first drummer, Lucas Fox in 1975, it was he who introduced the band to “Fast” Eddie Clarke, having worked with him while painting a houseboat.

After leaving Motörhead for the first time in 1984, Taylor joined Brian Robertson (who had played guitar briefly with Motörhead in the early 1980s but was deemed “not dirty enough” by devotees), to form the band Operator. In 1986, he joined the Frankie Miller Band and toured Europe, Scandinavia and America, but as he recalled, “I didn’t get along too well with Frankie on the road, so I left.”

Altogether Taylor recorded 10 studio albums with Motörhead and after leaving the band for a second time, from 2005 to 2008 he played and recorded in a group called the Web of Spider with Iggy Pop on guitar. He played drums sporadically for other groups, including Mick Farren and The Deviants.

Phil Taylor made his last public appearance in November last year when he, Lemmy and Clarke, the classic Motörhead line-up, reunited for a gig at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham. In the event Taylor came on stage, waved to the crowd and left.

Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor, born September 21 1954, died November 11 2015

Helmut Schmidt, West German chancellor

Helmut Schmidt in 2009

Helmut Schmidt, who has died aged 96, dominated the European stage more than any other politician during the 1970s as chancellor of West Germany; his eight years in office (1974-82) were marked by his restless energy and personal command of such difficult areas as defence and finance.

Schmidt led from the front, a quality appreciated by voters but ultimately scorned by his Social Democratic Party (SPD). Its Leftward drift in the early 1980s let him down and condemned it to the opposition benches for much longer than could have been expected.

Small in stature and, physically, surprisingly frail, Schmidt (or Schnauze, “The Lip”, as he was popularly known) was a tough, terrier-like politician, impatient of mediocrity. He had an intellectual breadth and versatility rare among modern German politicians, and he knew it. He was especially hurt that a man of much less obvious talent, Helmut Kohl, should unseat him as Chancellor through the political treachery of his Liberal coalition partners rather than by the ballot box.

None the less, physically exhausted by the exigencies of his hands-on approach to government, Schmidt might have enjoyed a shorter life had he had a longer spell in office. An over-active thyroid condition was diagnosed in 1972. This required constant medication, and in 1981, overtaxed by work, he had a heart pacemaker fitted.

Margaret Thatcher with Helmut Schmidt in 1982When, the following year, he prematurely lost his job as chancellor, he was at least cushioned by his interests outside politics – notably music, in which he was an accomplished performer. He could, moreover, sit back and pontificate through the pages of the weekly Die Zeit, of which he became a joint publisher, and through a spell on the lucrative American lecture circuit.

His contribution to German, European and Alliance politics was great, and will be remembered especially for its uncompromising stance on defence in the face of the Soviet arms build-up during the Brezhnev years.

Mindful of the events in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Schmidt’s priority was to ensure that an inward-looking United States was securely coupled to Europe. He thus became the chief architect and protagonist of Nato’s so-called “dual track” decision to counter Moscow’s SS-20 medium-range rocket arsenal by stationing American Cruise and Pershing-II missiles in Europe.

It was a bold stand for a German Social Democrat and was to incur the displeasure of his party’s Left wing as well as of the increasingly vociferous anti-nuclear movement. But it was endorsed by his principal political opponents, the Christian Democrats.

Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 only strengthened Schmidt’s resolve, and by then he could count on Margaret Thatcher’s unequivocal support from London. In the end, Schmidt’s determination may have contributed to his losing power in Germany, but it was undoubtedly a factor in the collapse of Communism across eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at the end of the decade. Disarmament followed.

A committed European, Schmidt will also be remembered as the joint architect in 1978 – with French President Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt a former finance minister – of the European Monetary System, in which the robust German currency was destined to play a pivotal role. He could thus claim to be a pioneer of European Monetary Union.

Typically for a native of Hamburg, he was prone to Anglophilia – something which, he used to say, he “imbibed with his mother’s milk”. He spoke good English, and was keen to see Britain at the centre of Europe, although he well understood British reservations.

In 1974 he addressed the Labour Party conference only months after succeeding Willy Brandt as chancellor and offered a spirited defence of British EC membership. But, he acknowledged, it was like trying to convince a Salvation Army gathering of the merits of drink.

Helmut Schmidt with Leonid Brezhnev in 1980  

In Bonn, Schmidt made a point of cultivating the Anglo-Saxon press, sometimes at the expense of the domestic media. To a modern German chancellor, he once remarked, the two most important newspapers were The New York Times and The Financial Times. Their correspondents, and those of other foreign newspapers, were regularly invited to informal weekend evenings at the Chancellor’s bungalow when he, or a musician friend, would play the piano, and the discussion could fall on German Expressionism or the scupltor Henry Moore.

Schmidt was proud that he had a major work by Moore on the lawn of his otherwise austere modern Chancellery complex, the corridors of which he had hung with excellent Expressionist paintings; he was particularly fond of the work of the Bonn-born painter August Macke, who had been killed in the First World War, as well as that of Ernst Barlach, whose sculpture the Nazis considered degenerate.

As a musician, Schmidt especially loved Bach, Mozart and Brahms, and he was a pianist of near-professional standard. With his friends Justus Frantz and Christoph Eschenbach, he recorded for EMI Mozart’s concerto for three pianos, with the London Symphony Orchestra, in 1981; three years later he recorded Bach’s concerto for four keyboards and strings for Deutsche Grammophon. Both these efforts were well received by the critics. He also played the organ and was a talented chess-player.

Although his musical interests and his love of sailing would have appealed to Edward Heath (who stepped down as prime minister in the year that Schmidt became chancellor), it was with James Callaghan and Denis Healey (to whom he was sometimes compared) that Schmidt formed strong political friendships. He had no particular liking for, or affinity with, Harold Wilson, with whom he initially dealt as chancellor. He was later, however, to hold Margaret Thatcher in high regard, despite their political disagreements. Like her, Schmidt often had a surer grasp of detail than his ministers and did not suffer fools gladly. He shared with her a reputation for arrogance.

Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was born on December 23 1918 – six weeks after the Armistice – in Barmbeck, a tough working-class district of Hamburg. His father, Gustav, was a schoolmaster who lived to see his son lead his country, dying in 1981 at the age of 92.

Like the other boys at his school, the young Schmidt joined the Hitler Youth, and in 1937, aged 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He served with an anti-aircraft battery on the Russian Front in 1941-42. After being commissioned he was decorated with the Iron Cross and transferred to operations in the Western Front. During the Battle of the Bulge, which followed the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944, Oberleutnant Schmidt was captured by British troops and held as a PoW in Belgium for six months.

It was during this time that he became a Socialist and abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming an architect. On his release he went to Hamburg University, where he read Economics, joined the Social Democratic Party and became president of the university’s Socialist Student Federation. On graduating, at the age of 30 he went to the Hamburg State Office for Economics, rising by 1952 to be head of the transport section. The next year he was elected to the Bundestag in Bonn as a Social Democrat deputy.

Schmidt with his wife Hannelore on holiday in Brahmsee in 1982 

Among the rank-and-file of the SPD parliamentary party he quickly earned a reputation as a maverick. To a party emotionally opposed to rearmament, Schmidt argued forcefully that the party should master defence policy issues and assert parliamentary control over the armed forces. He raised some eyebrows by taking part as a reserve officer in manoeuvres of the newly formed Bundeswehr (West German armed forces).

Weary of opposition in Bonn, Schmidt left the Bundestag in 1962 to become Senator for Internal Affairs in the Hamburg state government. He had barely taken office when Hamburg was struck by a fearsome hurricane and the river Elbe burst its banks. A fifth of the city was flooded and 300 people drowned.

But Schmidt, cutting through red tape, took control of the emergency so forcefully that a further 1,000 people at risk from drowning were saved, and the thousands made homeless were swiftly rehoused. Media coverage projected him as a national hero; his reputation as an “action” politician – Macher (doer) – was made.

In 1965 Schmidt returned to the Bundestag and became leader of the SPD parliamentary party as a grand coalition was forged between the two main parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. When, in 1969, the SPD emerged as the largest party, and its chairman, Willy Brandt, opted for an alliance with the Liberal Free Democrats, Schmidt was an obvious choice for the defence portfolio.

He brought with him to the ministry his own group of advisers, including – controversially – a prominent industrialist from the Thyssen conglomerate. During Schmidt’s three years at the defence ministry the position of non-commissioned officers was improved; there was an increased flow of volunteers; and he was able to cut conscription to 18 months. He shocked conservatives by allowing recruits to grow their hair long.

A new defence strategy was devised to cope with the threat of Soviet armoured incursion and, along with Britain, West Germany joined Nato’s newly formed Euro-Group to increase Europe’s contribution to Alliance costs and to rationalise European procurement practice.

In 1972 Schmidt moved to his other area of specialisation, taking over the so-called “super-ministry” of economics and finance. Later that year the SPD-led coalition was returned to government, and the ministry was divided into its component parts, with Schmidt taking the finance portfolio.

Meanwhile, a burgeoning United States budget deficit threatened the stability of the Deutschemark, raising the (for Germans) horrific spectre of inflation. Schmidt responded by seeking collaboration among European countries, notably France, whose finance minister, Giscard d’Estaing, like Schmidt, was destined soon to take over the reins of government. In 1973, just before the oil crisis which brought double-digit inflation in the United States and Britain, it was agreed to float the European currencies against the dollar.

In 1974 the Chancellorship was suddenly thrust upon a willing Schmidt following the resignation of Willy Brandt, whose personal assistant, Günter Guillaume, had been found to be an East German spy. A period of strong leadership followed, with West Germany playing a valued role shouldering responsibility in Europe and the Alliance.

With Schmidt’s advocacy of Nato’s “dual track” negotiate-and-deploy decision on medium-range nuclear missiles, Bonn was setting the pace in defence. With the birth of the European Monetary System (or “Snake in the Tunnel”) in 1978, it led in finance. Furthermore, in 1977 Schmidt’s reputation for getting results was enhanced by the successful storming by German commandos of a Lufthansa airliner held by Baader-Meinhof terrorists at Mogadishu in Somalia. Schmidt’s political career had peaked.

Schmidt with Ronald Reagan and the then Mayor of Berlin, Richard von Weizsaecker, at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin in 1982 

He was returned to office in the autumn 1980 general election, when he convincingly beat off the challenge from Franz-Josef Strauss, the conservatives’ candidate for Chancellor. Subsequently, however, the economy began to turn against Schmidt: unemployment rose and budgets became harder to balance; economic differences with his Free Democrat coalition partners, on whom he depended for his parliamentary majority, brought tensions.

Meanwhile, the Left wing of the SPD and the anti-nuclear movement stepped up their opposition to the planned deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles. The luminous potential of Schmidt’s summit meeting, in December 1981, with the East German leader Erich Honecker was eclipsed by the simultaneous declaration of martial law in Poland and the clampdown on the trades union Solidarity. The new decade was bringing fresh problems which Schmidt was not so well equipped to tackle.

Gradually his authority was eroded, until he was left in the lurch by his erstwhile Liberal allies and ousted by Helmut Kohl in October 1982. The Schmidt era ended in bitterness and disappointment, and he preferred not to linger long in active politics, even though he remained personally popular with the electorate.

Helmut Schmidt derived much strength from his marriage, in 1942, to Hannelore (“Loki”) Glaser, whom he had known since childhood and who died in 2010. Germans were shocked earlier this year when the 96-year old Schmidt admitted that some 45 years earlier he had had an extra-marital affair, but had turned down his wife’s offer to stand aside for his mistress.

They had a son, who died in infancy during the war years, and a daughter, who survives him.

Helmut Schmidt, born December 23 1918, died November 10 2015