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 Ultimately both players were superseded by Gordon Banks.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