Squadron Leader Les Munro, Dambuster pilot

Last surviving Dambuster pilot whose later bombing raids in France helped secure the bridgehead after D-Day

Squadron Leader Les Munro

Squadron Leader Les Munro, who has died aged 96, was the last surviving pilot to have taken part on the Dambusters raid, which attacked the Ruhr Dams in May 1943.

Munro’s Lancaster was one of the first to take off on the night of May 16. Their target was the Sorpe Dam. Flying at very low level over the Dutch island of Vlieland, the bomber was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. The radios and electrical system were disabled but, crucially, so was the intercommunication system between members of the crew. Without this it was impossible to carry out the precise attack from a height of 60 feet, so with great reluctance, Munro turned for his home base at Scampton, near Lincoln, still with his “bouncing bomb” on board.

The raid against the Ruhr dams was successful, with the main targets, the Mohne and Eder Dams, both breached. But the cost was high with eight of the 19 Lancasters failing to return, with the loss of 53 airmen. The leader of the operation, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, was awarded the Victoria Cross.

^{A Lancaster of 617 Squadron} 

John Leslie Munro was born on April 5 1919 at Gisborne, New Zealand, where his Scottish father had emigrated in 1903. He worked as a farmer before joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force in July 1941.

He trained initially in New Zealand and then in Canada, where he completed his qualification as a pilot. On arrival in England he trained on bombers before joining No 97 Squadron, which had recently been re-equipped with the Lancaster.

After an operation to drop mines in the sea-lanes to German occupied ports, Munro attacked industrial cities in Germany during the so-called “Battle of the Ruhr” when Essen, Dusseldorf and Cologne were among his targets. He also flew on two raids to Berlin and attacked targets in Italy. He and his crew were approaching the end of their tour of operations (30 sorties) when volunteers were called for to form a new squadron for a “special operation”. Munro discussed it with his crew and they agreed to apply. A few days later, on March 25, they arrived at Scampton to join “X” Squadron on its formation, later to become No 617.

Soon after leaving No. 97 Squadron, Munro was awarded the DFC for “pressing home his attacks with great courage and determination”.

Within days of arriving at Scampton, all the crews were practising intensive low-level flying including runs over lakes and reservoirs when high-tension cables, barrage balloons and birds were an ever-present hazard. During a trial flight with the “Upkeep” bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis, Munro was flying below the prescribed height of 60 feet when a great plume of water made by the bomb as it made its first bounce damaged the tailplane of his Lancaster.

^{Les Munro (centre at front) with his crew in front of Lancaster 'W for William', which they flew on the Dam Busters raid} 

After the Dams Raid, Munro remained on No 617. The squadron suffered further heavy losses and morale was badly affected. Under the leadership of its new commanding officer, Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, Munro was made a flight commander. The other two flight commanders were Dave Shannon, an Australian, and the American Joe McCarthy and these three, under Cheshire’s inspiring leadership , created one of the most effective squadrons to serve in Bomber Command. Cheshire described his three flight commanders as “the backbone of the squadron”. Of the three, the slow speaking, taciturn New Zealander was the least flamboyant, but his rock steady dependability and utter reliability were an inspiration to his young crews.

Cheshire was dissatisfied with the marking of targets by the Pathfinder Force and he developed his own low-level marking technique that proved highly successful. Munro dropped flares from high level and Cheshire dived beneath them to accurately mark the targets for the following bombers.

On the eve of D-day on June 5 1944, No 617 flew Operation Taxable, a complex flight requiring extremely accurate flying, navigation and timing. Munro, with Cheshire as his co-pilot, was flying one of the lead aircraft, which flew a series of orbits as it advanced across the English Channel towards the Pas de Calais dropping window (reflective metal strips) to simulate an amphibious landing force approaching the area. This deception created doubt in the Germans' minds as to where the Allied landing was taking place and delayed the despatch of reinforcements to Normandy.

After the landings, the squadron flew in support of troops establishing the bridgehead. On the night of June 8 , it had a spectacular success when Munro dropped one of the new 12,000-lb “Tallboy” bombs, which completely destroyed the Saumur railway tunnel.

On the following nights he dropped “Tallboys” on the E-boat pens at Le Havre and Boulogne before attacking the V-weapon sites at Wizernes and Mimoyecques. After this latter raid, his 55th, heand his fellow flight commanders were “retired”. He had recently been awarded the DSO, his citation concluding with the words, “His achievements have been worthy of the greatest praise.”

^{Les Munro leaning out of the cockpit of Lancaster 'W for William'} 

Munro finished the war in command of a Bomber Defence Training Flight. He returned to New Zealand and left the RNZAF in February 1946 as a squadron leader.

Munro made a major contribution to community life in New Zealand and was Mayor of Tekuiti from 1978 to 1995. He was awarded the Queen’s Service Order in 1981 and appointed Commander of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1997 for “services to local government and community”.

Munro retained strong links with his old squadron and made a number of trips to the United Kingdom on special anniversaries. He was present when the Queen dedicated the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park in 2012. Earlier this year he placed his medals with an auction house to raise money for the maintenance of the memorial. At the last minute, Lord Ashcroft stepped in to stop the sale, offering to donate £75,000 to the memorial’s upkeep if Munro gifted his medals to the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland.

^{Les Munro on a visit to the Bomber Command Memorial in London in 2013} 

Les Munro’s wife Betty predeceased him and he is survived by four of their five children.

Squadron Leader Les Munro, born April 5 1919, died August 4 2015

Sir Christopher Lee

Sir Christopher Lee

Sir Christopher Lee, the actor, who died aged 93, defined the macabre for a generation of horror film enthusiasts with his chilling portrayals of Count Dracula; in a career that spanned more than half a century Lee played the sinister vampire no fewer than nine times in productions including Dracula (1958), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).

With his saturnine glamour and striking physique — at a gaunt 6ft 4in he was a dominating physical presence with an aristocratic bearing, dark, penetrating eyes and a distinctive sepulchral voice — Lee was an ideal candidate to play the bloodsucking Count. “Dracula is a very attractive character,” he insisted, “he’s so heroic – erotic too. Women find him irresistible. We’d all like to be him.”

After almost 20 years of playing Dracula, Lee eventually tired of the role. He moved to the United States where he enjoyed a lucrative career in both films and made-for-television mini-series such as The Far Pavilions and Shaka Zulu. While in America, Lee resisted all offers of parts in soap operas including Dallas and Dynasty.

^{Christopher Lee with Veronica Carlson in Dracula has Risen from the Grave, 1968} 

“You find yourself appearing with 15 other guest stars,” he recalled, “and word gets round that you’re on the skids.” Instead he surprised his fans by accepting “voice roles” in various animated films, playing Uncle Drosselmeyer in Nutcracker Fantasy (1979) and King Haggard in The Last Unicorn (1980). More surprising still was his acceptance of the role of Prince Philip in the ill-fated television film Charles and Diana: A Royal Love Story (1982).

After decades in the film industry, Lee remained as eager as ever to take on new roles. At one point in his early seventies he appeared in 12 different films within 14 months. “I get restless and frustrated if I don’t work,” he explained. “I like a continual challenge.” In his eighties he gained a new audience, bringing sulphurous intensity to the role of Saruman in Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings films.

Lee’s one regret, he maintained, was his decision not to become an opera singer. “I was born with the gift of a very good voice,” he said, “and I have been asked to sing in various concerts but I’m too old now.” Late in life, however, he was persuaded to lend his rich bass tones as a narrator to various heavy metal records including those of the symphonic power metal group Rhapsody of Fire. In 2010 he released an album of his own, Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, followed two years later by Charlemagne: The Omens of Death.

Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was born on May 27 1922 in Belgravia, London, the son of Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Trollope-Lee of the 60th King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Lee’s father had fought in both the Boer and Great Wars and had later married an Italian contessa, Estelle Maria Carandini, a descendant of the Borgias whose parents had founded the first Australian opera company. Among Lee’s stories of his early life he claimed that his father was descended from a band of gypsies in Hampshire and that his mother was descended from Charlemagne.

Christopher’s parents were divorced when he was four and his mother remarried. Lee grew up in his stepfather’s house, where he was waited on by a staff of five (a butler, two footmen, a chauffeur and a cook). He attended Wagner’s in Queensgate and Summerfields, and sat for a scholarship to Eton before being sent to the more affordable Wellington College where he distinguished himself as a classical scholar.

^{Christopher Lee in The Man with the Golden Gun, 1974}

Fluent in Italian and French, in later life Lee added Spanish, German, Russian, Swedish, Danish and Greek to his repertoire. When his alcoholic stepfather was bankrupted in 1938 Christopher was forced to leave school at 17 in order to find work. For the next 12 months he worked as a city messenger, licking stamps and making tea for a wage of £1 a week.

When the Second World War broke out, Lee joined the RAF and was promoted to flight lieutenant. He won six campaign medals, was mentioned in despatches and received decorations from Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. He also worked for British Intelligence. “Serving in the Armed Forces was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he insisted. “I did not know how other people lived.”

After the war, Lee served with the Central Registry of War Crimes, work that took him to concentration camps including Dachau, but when he was demobbed at the age of 24, he remained undecided about which career to pursue. He toyed with the idea of becoming a ballet dancer, opera singer and diplomat before his cousin (at that time the Italian ambassador to the Court of St James) suggested he try acting.

Greatly against his mother’s wishes — (“Just think of all the appalling people you’ll meet!” she warned him) — Lee met the Italian head of Two Cities Films, part of the J Arthur Rank Organisation, signed a seven-year contract, and joined the Rank Company of Youth (otherwise known as the Rank Charm School) in 1946. He made his film debut with a bit part in Corridor of Mirrors (1948).

^{Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, 1973} 

A succession of “walk-on” parts ensued until, in 1951, he appeared in a speaking part as a swarthy Spanish sea captain in Captain Horatio Hornblower RN. It was one of Lee’s last films for Two Cities and when his contract ran out neither he nor the Rank Organisation were eager to renew it. Instead Lee accepted roles in a television series — made in Britain but shown first in America — Douglas Fairbanks Presents, appearing in some 40 half-hour productions.

After a series of military film roles in the mid-1950s, including a lieutenant in Innocents in Paris (1953), a submarine commander in The Cockleshell Heroes and a captain in That Lady (both 1955), Lee landed his first horror role for Hammer Films. He played the Creature in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), a part which required him to be coated in artificial gangrene and which left him looking, in his opinion, “like a road accident”.

Described as “the first gothic horror film made by Hammer”, The Curse of Frankenstein was graphic in its depiction of large quantities of gore. The film was extremely popular and Lee, playing opposite the studio’s resident star Peter Cushing, was enormously successful as the monster. Realising that a film about Bram Stoker’s vampiric Transylvanian nobleman might prove equally successful, a Hammer executive, James Carreras, offered Lee the role of the Count in their next production, Dracula.

The film proved to be one of the seminal horror movies of the 1950s. Lee looked the part (tall and thin, as in Stoker’s novel) and imbued the character with a dynamic, feral quality that had been lacking in earlier portrayals. With his bloody fangs and bright red eyes ablaze, Lee made a frighteningly believable vampire. In contrast with Bela Lugosi’s eerie, somnambulistic count of the 1930s, Lee spoke his lines with crisp assurance and tried to portray what he described as “the essence of nobility, ferocity and sadness”.

^{Christopher Lee as Saruman in The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, 2001} 

With Cushing cast this time as the vampire hunter, Dracula (retitled Horror of Dracula in America) was a box-office success for Hammer and horror aficionados at the time labelled it “the greatest horror movie ever made”. Lee also regarded it as the best of the series of Dracula films which he made with Hammer. “It’s the only one I’ve done that’s any good,” he recalled. “It’s the only one that remotely resembles the book.”

With the success of his portrayal of the Count, Lee treated himself to a grey, second-hand Mercedes and became established as a horror star for the first time. He was swamped with offers of film roles and took leading parts in several films throughout the late 1950s.

In productions such as The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Mummy (all 1959), Lee played characters ranging from Sir Henry Baskerville to a 2,000-year-old corpse. He later claimed that the make-up for The Mummy was so uncomfortable that he swore never to submit to special effects again. The exceptions were the essential red contact lenses for his appearances as Dracula. Lee found the lenses excruciatingly painful but, as he had worn them in the first film, continuity demanded that he wear them in all subsequent productions.

Lee continued to be in demand throughout the 1950s and 1960s, starring in more than 20 films in only six years. Although he accepted some unlikely projects (including The Terror of the Tongs and The Devil’s Daffodil, both in 1961), he was also able to make films in which he had a personal interest. He had long wanted to play the Chinese arch-villain Fu Manchu and in 1965 he was offered the title role in The Face of Fu Manchu. The film was so popular that a series of four more were filmed, including Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) and Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1968). After roles in horror films such as Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors and The Skull (both 1965), Lee returned to his earlier incarnation in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966).

He was less happy with this second film. He had become too expensive a star for the Hammer studios, and in a cost-cutting measure his scenes were kept to a minimum and remained devoid of dialogue. Lee was reduced to making a soft hissing noise which drew laughter from audiences when the film was screened. He enjoyed more success with the lead in Rasputin, The Mad Monk (1966). Although the film was badly flawed, Lee was convincing in the title role.

After The Devil Rides Out (1968), a suspenseful adaptation of a Dennis Wheatley novel with Lee as an aristocrat in pursuit of devil-worshippers, he returned to the role of Dracula in Dracula has Risen from the Grave, on the understanding that he would have well-scripted dialogue. The film made more money than previous Hammer productions and Lee was persuaded to appear in the 1970 project, Scars of Dracula. But he had by this time become disenchanted with the role. He feared he was being typecast and that the quality of scriptwriting had deteriorated to an unacceptable level.

^{Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness 1966} 

Nevertheless Hammer were eager to continue with Lee as their horror star and persuaded him to make two more Dracula films that year. After rapidly completing Taste the Blood of Dracula and The Magic Christian, Lee devoted himself to non-vampire roles for a period.

Later in 1970 he played Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (“so commandingly good,” reported The Sunday Telegraph, “that this must surely be the end of shabby Draculas for him”) and followed it with a tiny appearance as Artemidorus in Julius Caesar in 1971. After four more Dracula films, including a modern interpretation titled Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula the year after, Lee was increasingly unhappy with the manner in which the character was being portrayed. “It’s ridiculous,” he complained, “you can’t have Dracula in a modern office block, it completely undermines the original idea.”

Taking another break from the Count, Lee appeared in one of his favourite films, The Wicker Man (1973), playing a Scots laird who practises human sacrifice in the 20th century. He then went on to play the evil one-eyed Comte de Rochefort in both The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974) before appearing in his first Bond film as the assassin Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (also 1974). Lee was finally persuaded to make one more Dracula-style film in the 1970s, Dracula Père et Fils (1976), before giving up the role for good.

Despite his physical likeness to the Count, Lee’s affinity with his baleful character stopped there. Throughout his career he had a reputation for being a long-winded raconteur whose reminiscences tended to focus on himself. In 1976, when Lee left Britain for the US, the move prompted an acquaintance to joke that “the population of Los Angeles were dusting out their bomb shelters in anticipation of a barrage of anecdotes”. According to another account, on one occasion an actress got off an aircraft looking ashen and exhausted. Questioned about her health by airport staff, she explained that she had been seated next to Lee and that he had not stopped talking about himself during the 10-hour flight.

Through the late 1970s, Lee continued to make films at a prodigious rate, appearing in 10 in two years. He accepted roles as diverse as Captain Rameses in the science fiction film Starship Invasions (1977) and that of the head gypsy in the Second World War drama The Passage (1979).

In the 1980s, Lee combined his film career with a return to television, appearing in mini-series including Charles and Diana: A Royal Love Story (1982) and The Far Pavilions (1984). In 1985 he suffered a heart attack, returned to London and underwent heart surgery. Instead of seeing this as a signal to retire, Lee was back at work within a year and had returned to the horror genre for the dreadful The Howling II (1986), subtitled Your Sister is a Werewolf in America.

Although Lee continued to work prolifically throughout his life, he never again enjoyed the same success as when playing Dracula. He made some fatuous comedies in the mid-1980s such as Rosebud Beach Hotel (1985) and Jocks (1986), and continued into the 1990s with a starring role in the spoof horror film Gremlins II — The New Batch.

He starred in the title role of Jinnah soon after the 50th anniversary of the founding of Pakistan in 1997, and was Count Dooku in Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones (2002). He returned to the same role in Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith in 2005, and was the wizard Saruman in two of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (2001-2002), in two of his Hobbit series (2012-14) and in various video games.

With Uma Thurman, Lee was due to appear as a retired surgeon in The 11th, a film about the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks, to be shot this autumn.

Reflecting near the end of his life about the role of Dracula, Lee said: “There is a lot of misunderstanding about me in that role. It had never been played properly before that. With me it was all about the power of suggestion to make the unbelievable believable.”

He published two volumes of autobiography — Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977) reissued as Lord of Misrule (1997) — and was appointed CBE in 2001. He was knighted in 2009 and made a fellow of Bafta in 2011.

Christopher Lee is survived by his Danish wife, Birgit (née Kroencke), a painter and Dior model known as Gitte, whom he married in 1961, and by their daughter Christina.

Sir Christopher Lee, born May 27 1922, died June 7 2015

Ron Moody

Ron Moody in 2011 

Ron Moody, the actor and comedian, who has died aged 91, was one of the most original comic talents of his post-war stage generation; his best-known performance on stage and screen was as Fagin in Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s musical comedy (1960) from the novel Oliver Twist.

With his height, stooped figure, long, hooked nose, large eyes, lop-sided face, mournful expression, busy, inquisitive manner and India-rubber gait, Moody was unforgettably well cast as Dickens’s villainous old Jew and employer of thieves and pickpockets, and gave a superbly robust, precise and incisive performance.

Among his brilliantly delivered songs were You’ve got to pick a pocket or two and I’m reviewing the situation. After a year as Fagin he reviewed his situation. As a graduate of long-running West End satirical revues, with a gift for impersonation, caricature and satirising issues and icons of the day, he had become – with a single role – a star. The clever new clown with the tragi-comic stance and the larger-than-life technique decided to quit. He never found another part to match its triumph, though he remained in more or less constant employment for the rest of his career in films, on television, in musical comedies of his own devising, and in cabaret. He had been typecast: he could never break the mould.

He was also a graduate of the London School of Economics. “When you have spent five of your formative years thinking and studying in a university, it affects your values. You live your life on a different level,” he said years later. “I don’t consider myself a professional actor. I have failed all my life, and I’m not ashamed of it. After all, what’s so good about success? It is unhealthy. It creates a completely false sense of values.”

^{Ron Moody with Mark Lester (left) and Jack Wild in Oliver!, 1968} 

He was born Ronald Moodnick in Tottenham, north London, on January 8 1924 and brought up in what he liked to call “a persecuted atmosphere which made me a bit like a bar of soap. When I’m squeezed I just pop up again instead of melting away.” Ron attended the London School of Economics and, after gaining his BSc (Econ) degree, became a research graduate in Sociology. He intended as a Fabian Socialist to become a lecturer, but, when the first girl he fell in love with turned down his proposal of marriage, he turned at 29 to the professional stage and without training found immediate success in small-scale, satirical musical revue, then still in London fashion.

At a West London fringe theatre, the New Lindsey in Kensington, he made his first appearance in Intimacy at Eight (1952) with a cast including Leslie Crowther and Joan Sims. He played in its sequel, More Intimacy at Eight, a year later and stayed for 500 performances of its West End transfer as Intimacy at 8.30 (Criterion, 1954).

In his next revue, For Amusement Only (Apollo 1956) he clocked up 700 performances. In its sequel, For Adults Only (Strand, 1958), he had two minor triumphs, first as Dylan Thomas comparing notes with Hugh Paddick (as James Dean) from their celestial clouds in a sketch called Over Milk Wood, and then as Pierrot, the mime, at large in London Airport, a favourite role.

^{Ron Moody in Nobody's Perfect, 1980} 

In Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical comedy, Candide (Saville, 1959) he created another stir as the lecherous governor of Buenos Aires in his tricorn hat, imprisoning with relish all the less-attractive pilgrims.

It was, however, as Fagin, the Dickensian leader of a gang of Cockney thieves in the musical Oliver! (New, now Albery, 1960) that Moody had the kind of success by which an actor’s art is sometimes immortalised.

He was 36. It made him, overnight, a star. His departure after a year’s run dismayed the author and the management. “Fagin,” he said at the time, “is a very demanding part. I can’t relax for a moment. I use up a lot of nervous and physical energy. But I need a rest. Fagin has done a lot for me. I’ve had film offers, and I think my career has advanced considerably. Now it’s time for me to try something new.”

He began writing a musical comedy of his own, The Great Grimaldi, then accepted an offer to star in a show on Broadway. But he turned that down to get on with his Grimaldi show, now called Joey, Joey, which the Bristol Old Vic staged at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1962 with him in the title role and as the author of the book, lyrics and music.

Of its arrival in the West End (Saville, 1966) the Daily Telegraph’s W A Darlington wrote: “It was clever of Mr Moody to write the whole of Joey, Joey, a musical based on the life of the great clown Joe Grimaldi. In a rather uninspired way book, lyrics and music all served their purpose.

“It was rash of Mr Moody in my view to top off all this quite notable achievement by playing the part of Grimaldi himself. Not that he did it badly. He has a pleasant personality and is by no means a bad actor. Probably he played the part about as well as anybody would who is not a born funny man. Grimaldi was a born funny man.”

Meanwhile Moody, from leaving Oliver!, had appeared, though not to any critical success, in his own BBC television series, Moody in Storeland, and in cameo roles in numerous film comedies including Make Mine Mink, Five Golden Hours, A Pair of Briefs, Summer Holiday, The Mouse on the Moon, Ladies Who Do, Murder Most Foul, Every Day’s a Holiday, San Ferry Ann and The Sandwich Man.

In 1968 the screen version of Oliver! brought him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination as Fagin — honours which led to his first, disenchanted visit to Hollywood — and awards from the Moscow Film Festival and the Variety Club of Great Britain. Within a few months of Joey, Joey closing in the West End Moody discovered respect on the stage again as Captain Hook in Peter Pan which he went on to play at the Scala (1966), Coliseum (1972), Palladium (1975) and London Casino (1977).

He branched out in the classics from time to time. He played in Aristophanes and had more than merely an actor’s hand in a version of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, titled Liz (Marlowe, Canterbury, 1968). He also played Polonius and the First Gravedigger to Keith Michell’s Hamlet (Bankside Globe 1972).

As Mr Sterling in Ian McKellen’s revival of The Clandestine Marriage (Savoy 1975) he found himself acting opposite the much-loved Alastair Sim as Lord Ogelby who, before Moody had left West End revues, had unsuccessfully sued him in 1959 in the High Courts.

Sim’s plaint was that Moody, in a voice-over commercial on television, had imitated Sim’s famous voice so effectively, though anonymously, that whenever Sim dined out his restaurateur would ask if he required Heinz baked beans. For Sim to have been linked with such a promotion of such a product struck Sim as a prostitution of his actor’s art.

The style of the relationship between the two actors in the same theatrical production 15 years later is unrecorded.

Moody also played the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard III in Canada (1978), acted Fagin again in his own production of Oliver! in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1973 and in London at the Aldwych in 1983.

^{Ron Moody at the Bognor Clowns' Convention in the 1980s} 

Other stage work apart from cabarets included a self-mocking and slightly aggressive but critically welcomed one-man show, Move Along Sideways (Theatre Royal 1976), which he also played in the US; and his own production of The Showman (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1976) in which he wrote the book, lyrics and music and played the title role.

In the Royal Variety Show (Drury Lane, 1985) he sang I’m reviewing the situation from Oliver!, and took the title role in Leslie Bricusse’s Sherlock Holmes — The Musical (Cambridge, 1989). Of his characterisation of the detective The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer commented that it was “ a jovial vulgarian much given to rant ”.

In 1992 Moody starred in the West End transfer from the King’s Head, Islington, of a revue featuring the music and lyrics of Vivian Ellis, Spread a Little Happiness (Whitehall), but quit rehearsals after differing with the director about his freedom to address the audience as long as he did not make them feel uneasy. During a preview he declared: “You’re a rotten audience.” He was replaced.

Among other film credits were David Copperfield (1969) in which he played Uriah Heep, The Twelve Chairs, Flight of the Doves, Legend of the Werewolf, Spot, Dominique, The Spaceman and King Arthur, The Man with the Deadly Lens and Where is Parsifal? His appearance as Merlin in the Disney production A Kid in King Arthur’s Court brought him to a new, younger audience.

Apart from his own television series, most notably in Moody (1968) with a live audience in the studio, he won approval as Det-Sgt Albert Adams in Hideaway (1986), “funny and relentless but resigned”, as the Daily Telegraph’s Sean Day-Lewis put it, to “a cynical view of the losing battle against crime but really in control”; he had a spell in EastEnders and appeared in Casualty.

Other British television credits included Midnight is a Place, a children’s suspense drama, in which he played a child-murderer and, in America, The Word and Nobody’s Perfect.

Among his books were a novel, The Devil You Don’t (1980), Off the Cuff (1998), which was about public speaking, Very Very Slightly Imperfect (1983), a novel drawn from his disheartening days in Hollywood, and a memoir, A Still Untitled (Not Quite) Autobiography (2011).

From 1974 Moody lived with his elderly mother, his sister, brother-in-law and three nephews in a house in Hornsey. But at the age of 60 he met and, in 1985, married Therese Blackbourn, a Pilates teacher. She survives him with their six children.

Ron Moody, born January 8 1924, died June 11 2015

James Last, band leader

James Last in the 1970s 

James Last, the German big band leader, who died aged 86, was the acknowledged master of “easy listening”, specialising in swirling, foot-tapping orchestral and soft vocal takes on classical and pop favourites.

There were two schools of thought on Last’s string-heavy brand of “happy music”. He never won a Brit or troubled the Grammy voters, and in general musical cognoscenti, both classical and pop, considered him irredeemably naff – the “Emperor of Elevator Music” – to be ranked alongside Mantovani and listened to with a Babycham topped with a maraschino cherry.

Yet “Hansi”, as he was affectionately known by his legions of fans, was phenomenally successful, selling well over 100 million albums and winning 17 platinum and 206 gold disc awards – more than any other artist.

^{Last conducting his big band for a televised performance in 2009} 

The always smartly dressed Last was ubiquitous on German television, conducting his musicians for an audience of millions. He filled enormous concert halls and toured, playing more than 2,000 gigs in the course of his career.

He was particularly successful in Britain, where he had 52 hit albums between 1967 and 1986, making him second only to Elvis Presley in UK chart history; one British critic described him as being to music “what Harold Robbins is to literature”. He also had extraordinary staying power, continuing to perform at sell-out concerts until earlier this year.

Last composed some original melodies, including Happy Heart, which became a hit for Andy Williams and Petula Clark, and Games That Lovers Play (“Eine Ganze Nacht” in German), which was recorded by Eddie Fisher. But his true forte was rearranging the compositions of others. His formula was simple. He would take a popular chart hit (or well-known classical piece: Strauss (the Johanns) and Mozart were favourites) and orchestrate or reorchestrate it, smoothing off the harder edges and introducing a disco-friendly beat. “I just take songs that I like, make new arrangements and millions of people from China, Australia, America and Britain like what I do,” he explained.

Last was born Hans Last in the north German city of Bremen on April 17 1929 to an English father and a German mother. His father was an official in the city’s postal and public works department and a keen amateur musician.

Hans took piano lessons from the age of 10. At 14 he was sent to the Wehrmacht’s Bückeburg Military Music School, where he added the double bass and tuba to his repertoire, though his studies were interrupted when the school was bombed by the Allies.

After the fall of the Nazis, Last played the double bass at gigs in American GI clubs, which exposed him to new jazz styles, and in 1946, with his brothers Werner and Robert, he became one of the first members of Hans Günther Oesterreich’s Radio Bremen Dance and Entertainment Orchestra. Two years later he co-founded the Last-Becker Ensemble, which performed for seven years, for three of which (1950–52) he was voted the best bassist in the country by a German jazz poll.

Afterwards he became the in-house arranger for Polydor Records, as well as for a number of European radio stations.

In the early 1960s Last began to release some albums of his own – initially with little success. His breakthrough did not come until the middle of the decade, when he found his “happy sound” and began performing with his own orchestra under the stage name James Last. His Non-Stop Dancing (1965), a recording of brief renditions of popular songs, all linked together with an insistent beat and atmospheric background “party noises”, made him a major European star. “My idea was that you open the door and hear the party sounds,” he explained. “You think there is a party going on even if there are only two people in the room.”

^{One of Last's records with Polydor}

Once his albums started to fly off the shelves, Last began touring and became an even bigger success. Recreating the party atmosphere in the concert hall, he managed to get audiences on their feet and dancing in the aisles; in Hamburg they became positively delirious. He gave his first concert in Britain in October 1971 at the New Victoria Theatre in London; when he returned in 1973, the tour included three sell-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.

By 1973 Last had already racked up 100 golden records, sold 80 million LPs and had toured most of the world: “He has been to Russia and created scenes of ludicrous Western cultural decadence in Moscow’s grand stadium of sport,” a Billboard critic reported. “He has been to Canada, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Music fans in Outer Mongolia need not get too perturbed. He’s bound to find time to visit them soon.”

But it was not just the post-war generation that took Last to their hearts. When one of his tracks, The Seduction, was used as the theme tune in the 1980 film American Gigolo, he found a new audience, and when the film director Quentin Tarantino used his recording of The Lonely Shepherd for Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), his credibility was assured into the new century.

Last ended his performing career in April this year with two concerts at the Albert Hall – his 89th and 90th at the venue, and a final performance in Cologne.

^{James Last in performance earlier this year} 

By his own admission Last played as hard as he worked and his memoirs, My Autobiography (2007), revealed a man whose workaholic lifestyle and enthusiastic partying (including struggles with alcohol and serial womanising) blinded him to the demands of his family for many years. He always enjoyed a close relationship with his orchestra, however, many members of which had been with him from the beginning to the end of his career.

When his first wife Waltraud, whom he had married in 1955, died in 1997 he moderated the more excessive aspects of his behaviour, eventually marrying his second wife Christine, with whom he divided his time between homes in Hamburg and Florida. She survives him, with two children of his first marriage.

James Last, born April 17 1929, died June 9 2015

Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy as Mr Spock

Leonard Nimoy, who has died aged 83, was an obscure character actor in films and on television before achieving celebrity as the logical, emotionless alien Mr Spock in the 1960s television series Star Trek.

Nimoy redefined the character from the minor one envisaged at the show’s conception into the most memorable. When Paramount studios made the mistake of allowing Spock to be killed off at the end of its second feature film spin-off, Star Trek II, public demonstrations demanded his return. Paramount’s stock fell on Wall Street until the third film in the canon, The Search for Spock, was completed and the character was “regenerated”. Six further films followed.

First shown in Britain in 1969, the year of the first Moon landing, the series flopped in the United States, but it was picked up by the BBC and shown only after the entire run had ended in America. Even then it was originally scheduled in the Saturday teatime slot then normally occupied by Doctor Who, only moving to peak time when the hippies of the early 1970s tuned in and turned on to what became cult viewing.

Moreover, seven years of syndicated American re-runs so transformed the show’s fortunes that when Nimoy visited the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, he was astounded when Nasa astronauts asked for his autograph before he could ask for theirs.

Nimoy himself was the opposite of the unfeeling, imperturbable Spock. Humorous and emotional, he wrote romantic poetry, and published several volumes of verse, including Will I Think of You? (1974), We Are All Children Searching for Love (1977) and Warmed by Love (1983). He was also an enthusiastic participant in 1960s “love-ins”, gatherings where hippies came to relax and, more often than not, make love. “It wasn’t quite group sex,” he recalled, “but there was a lot of embracing.”

Nimoy’s personal professional inclinations were towards the musical extravaganza, and when Star Trek ended in 1969 he played musical roles on stage such as King Arthur in Camelot (1973), Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1974) and Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1976).

Later Nimoy embarked on a second, more successful and certainly more lucrative career, as a film director. He had directed several television programmes in the 1970s, but his first major film success was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). He followed this with the huge hit Three Men and a Baby (1987), which grossed over $350 million to overtake Fatal Attraction and become the top box office hit of the year. After that Nimoy broke away from comedy and directed the tear-jerking drama The Good Mother (1989).

_{Nimoy in 1970}

Leonard Simon Nimoy was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 26 1931, the son of a Jewish barber from the Ukraine, where the Russian word “nimoy” or “nemoi” means “mute”. His father was opposed to an acting career; he wanted his son to be a lawyer. But Leonard was determined to act. His boyhood film heroes included the British stars Boris Karloff (as Frankenstein’s monster) and Charles Laughton (as Quasimodo), and in 1950 he made his acting debut with a Yiddish theatre company.

His first mainstream theatrical role was as Stanley Kowolski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1955) and in 1959 he appeared as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

During the early 1960s Nimoy made his television debut playing a villain in the Western Rawhide. He went on to appear as a “heavy” in many other television series of that era, among them Wagon Train, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Dr Kildare, Bonanza and Get Smart.

Stardom came in 1966 when he appeared in Star Trek. Originally the role of Science Officer Spock was a background one, an exotic half-Earthling, half-Vulcan crew member aboard the US Starship Enterprise during its 23rd century galactic odyssey of exploration “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

The second-in-command was played by a woman, referred to as Number One. After the screening of the pilot episode, NBC Television insisted on replacing her and were just as anxious to be rid of Spock’s pointy ears. (In Star Trek’s early days, Spock’s ears and flyaway eyebrows were considered so controversial that they were airbrushed out of publicity stills. Nimoy himself was none too keen on the ears either, and the producer, Gene Roddenberry, promised to drop them if he remained unconvinced by Episode 13.)

Roddenberry capitulated over the woman Number One, but promoted Spock to replace her as second-in-command, a position he maintained, pointy ears and all, for all 79 episodes screened over three years.

As the series progressed Spock became as important and popular as Capt James Kirk (William Shatner). Audiences grew accustomed to his yellowish-green skin, two hearts and green blood, his strange signature Vulcan salute, paralysing neck-pinch, and his “Live long and prosper” blessing. While some viewers struggled to warm to a character who showed almost no emotion, Nimoy’s deadpan delivery and ironic use of the raised eyebrow turned him into what he described as “everybody’s favourite alien”.

When Star Trek ended in 1969 Nimoy was glad to be free of the Vulcan. “I owe a lot to Spock,” he said later, “he gave me my big break, but I don’t want to be playing an emotionless character for ever.” In 1970 Nimoy joined the cast of television’s Mission: Impossible, playing Paris, the master of disguises, often appearing in four or five different costumes during each episode.

Desperate to avoid typecasting, Nimoy published an autobiography, I Am Not Spock, in 1975, before launching into a series of hit musicals. During this period Nimoy appeared in several forgettable films, including The Missing are Deadly (1974), about a teenager who steals infected rats from her father’s laboratory. He also appeared in the 1978 remake of the science-fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

_{Spock, showing the distinctive ears and flyaway eyebrows, airbrushed out of publicity stills}

When offered the Spock part in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Nimoy was unenthusiastic. “Those ears were so painful to wear,” William Shatner recalled, “they were glued to the back of his head and he’s got the scars to prove it.” There was also the matter of half a million dollars which Nimoy claimed Paramount owed him in royalties for toys, posters and other Spock memorabilia — not to mention the use of his image in a British poster campaign for Heineken lager, which he found out about by accident on a visit to London. He refused to sign up for the film role until the studio paid up. It did.

Following the death of Spock in Star Trek II, Nimoy was disinclined to return for further appearances as Spock. Eventually he did agree, but on condition that he be allowed to direct the third film. Critics claimed that Star Trek III was “subdued”, but “in keeping with the tone of the original series”.

His second attempt at directing was more assured. In Star Trek IV, Nimoy led the crew of the Enterprise on what one reviewer called “a sharp turn towards comedy”. Contrary to the received Hollywood wisdom that sequels do less well than the original, Star Trek IV was a bigger hit than the first in the series.

Nimoy followed his first major directing success with a second. After Three Men and a Baby in 1988, he turned away from comedy to direct Diane Keaton in the emotional melodrama The Good Mother, about a divorced woman whose lover is accused of molesting her child.

“Six years after having completed the role, I am still affected by the character of Spock,” Nimoy noted in his 1975 autobiography. “Of course, the role changed my career. Or rather, gave me one… It also affected me very deeply and personally, socially, psychologically, emotionally. To this day I sense Vulcan speech patterns, Vulcan social attitudes, and even Vulcan patterns of logic and emotional suppression in my behaviour.”

Nimoy published a second volume of memoirs, I Am Spock, in 1995, but it was 2001 before he revealed that while making the original Star Trek television series, he had become an alcoholic and received treatment in a rehabilitation unit. In 1989 he was acrimoniously divorced from Sandi Zober, his wife of 32 years. His ex-wife demanded a multi-million-dollar settlement but Nimoy claimed that he had made his millions on Star Trek IV, released after their separation. Sandi Zober died in 2011.

Leonard Nimoy married secondly, in 1990, Susan Bay, a film executive 20 years his junior, who survives him with the son and daughter of his first marriage.

Leonard Nimoy, born March 26 1931, died February 27 201
5

Demis Roussos

Demis Roussos in 1976

Demis Roussos, the Greek singer who has died aged 68, became an unlikely heart throb in the 1970s when his album sales earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

He scored his biggest success in Britain in 1975 when he had five albums in the top 10 simultaneously and in 1976 when his annoyingly unforgettable romantic ballad Forever and Ever was No 1 in the single charts. Worldwide he sold more than 60 million albums. “My music came right on time,” Roussos told an interviewer in 2002. “It was romantic Mediterranean music addressed to all the people who wanted to go on holiday. My music was liked by the people ... other artists of the same era, Mediterranean, like Julio Iglesias and Nana Mouskouri, followed me.”

His publicity people described Roussos’s songs as a mixture of “Byzantine psalms and muezzin prayer calls”, and there was something otherworldly about his tremulous, near-falsetto delivery. But there was much that was strange about Roussos. Even if his voice had not compelled attention, his Falstaffian 23-stone girth, beard, long hair and penchant for billowing kaftans would have marked him out.

Incredibly to some, Roussos, who became known as “The Phenomenon”, became seen as a sex symbol. In Britain the mostly middle-aged female audiences at his sell-out concerts became every bit as hysterical about his wobbling chins and zithery ballads as their teenage counterparts had been for the Beatles. In later life he recalled that women in the front row would sometimes try to grab his kaftans to see if he was wearing anything underneath (the answer, he claimed, was no).

Critics, though, were less easily smitten. The Sun called him “The Big Squeak” and likened him to a cross between Mickey Mouse and Moby Dick. Others called him the “The Love Walrus” or “The Singing Tent”, while The Sunday Times said he sounded like a spaniel that had been kicked. And after two years of British hits, Roussos faded from view. The coup de grace, according to some, was administered by Mike Leigh in the scene in his Play For Today, Abigail’s Party (1977), in which the monstrous Bev (Alison Steadman) sways gormlessly to Forever and Ever, consigning Roussos to the ranks of the irredeemably unhip. His next two singles struggled to gain entry into the Top 40.

Roussos, however, felt that his inadvertent role in the film was proof that he had left an enduring impression on the 20th century: “Nobody can deny that my name left a mark into the century’s music,” he told The Guardian in 1999. “Even if I die tomorrow, Demis Roussos left a card, a trademark, something that cannot be forgotten.”

Artemios Ventouris Roussos was born to Greek parents on June 15 1946 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was working as an architect.

The family was forced to flee Egypt for Greece during the Suez crisis of 1956, leaving all of their possessions behind, and as soon as he was old enough young Demis, who sang in a Greek Byzantine church choir as a child and learned guitar, trumpet and piano in school, began work as a cabaret musician to to help his family make ends meet. His teenage years coincided with a boom in the Greek tourism industry and he began singing in tourist bars. By the mid-1960s he was performing covers of British and American pop hits, such as House of the Rising Sun and When a Man Loves a Woman, with a band called The Idols.

^{Demis Roussos performing in 1984} 

Towards the end of the decade he hooked up with the future film music composer Vangelis, with whom he formed Aphrodite’s Child, a prog-pop combo who fled to France after the Greek military coup of 1967 made them unwelcome in their homeland. In 1968 they released the song Rain And Tears (derived from Pachelbel’s Canon) during the student riots in Paris. Referring to the tear gas used on demonstrators, it sold more than a million copies in France and managed to scrape into the Top 40 in Britain.

^{Demis Roussos in 1976} 

After half a dozen albums in three years, Aphrodite’s Child broke up in 1971 and Roussos went solo, cutting his first album, On the Greek Side of My Mind, the same year. He was already well known on the continent but little known in Britain until 1974 when a BBC documentary, entitled The Roussos Phenomenon, turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

His first UK single to make the charts, Happy to be on an Island in the Sun, reached No 5 in 1975. Other hits included My Friend The Wind; Goodbye My Love, Goodbye; Quand je t’aime, Someday Somewhere and Lovely Lady Of Arcadia.

By the time his star began to wane in Britain Roussos was a wealthy man with a mansion outside Paris, a private jet, an estate in the south of France and all the other trappings of success. But he did not remain idle. In the early 1980s, while living in California, he went on a diet, shed more than six stone, then published A Question of Weight, which sold a million copies. He remained constantly popular in Europe, where he continued to tour, through his fluency in Spanish, French, Italian, German and Arabic, as well as Greek and English. In later years he found new fans in the Middle East, Russia and central Asia, developing what one critic described as “a new-age, ethnic kind of sound, influenced by Africa and the Balkans”.

^{Roussos performing in later life}

In 1985 he made an unwitting comeback into the British national consciousness when he was held captive for a few days in Beirut after his flight from Athens to Rome was hijacked by Hizbollah militants. The press reported that he had sung to his captors (not true, said Roussos) and had a bit of fun at his expense, one correspondent rejoicing that his captors “did not go unpunished”. In 2002 he enjoyed a mini-comeback when his “Best Of” collection, Forever And Ever, reached number 20 in the album charts and he undertook a tour of Britain.

Demis Roussos was married and divorced three times and is survived by a daughter of his first marriage and by a son of his second.

Demis Roussos, born June 15 1946, died January 25 201
5

Anne Kirkbride

Anne Kirkbride, who has died aged 60, played Deirdre, the bespectacled, careworn femme fatale in ITV’s record-breaking soap opera Coronation Street for more than 40 years, and became renowned for her cracked, throaty voice, caused by chain-smoking in real life, and straining neck cords that were even more alarming than her enormous glasses.

In 1998, during a bitter ratings war with the BBC’s EastEnders, when Deirdre was wrongfully imprisoned after a relationship with a con-man called Jon Lindsay, the nation reacted with the “Free the Weatherfield One” campaign. In Parliament, even Tony Blair passed comment on her sentencing. It was not, commentators agreed, the prime minister’s finest hour. Producers at Granada Television decided to free Deirdre after three weeks.

Anne Kirkbride first came to Granada’s notice in 1972 in the ITV series Another Sunday and Sweet FA and was offered the bit part of the teenage dolly-bird Deirdre Hunt in Coronation Street later that year. When the character’s popularity grew after a few appearances, Anne Kirkbride signed a contract in 1974 and had been in the soap ever since.

With her distinctive owlish spectacles, she played Deirdre with a passion, steering the character through a calamitous tangle of marriages, broken engagements and affairs that produced an on-screen daughter Tracy in 1977 – 20 years later the programme’s most notorious wild child – and the Street’s spectacularly dull husband, Ken Barlow (William Roache). Dumped, divorced and widowed, Deirdre’s edgiest moment came with her affair with Mike Baldwin (played by Johnny Briggs) only two years after her wedding to Ken in 1981, and which started a feud between the two rivals that ended only with Baldwin’s death 25 years later.

Anne Kirkbride’s Deirdre was nearly written out of the series in 1978, three years after her screen marriage to Ray Langton (Neville Buswell). When Buswell decided to leave the programme, the producers believed there were already enough single women in the fictional Street. After Buswell intervened, however, the writers decided that Deirdre the single mother would be an interesting concept, and Anne Kirkbride was asked to stay.

One of the highlights of her career was her on-screen wedding to Ken Barlow in July 1981, on the day the Prince of Wales married Lady Diana Spencer. But even this was eclipsed by Deirdre’s extra-marital affair with Baldwin in 1983. As Britain held its breath, a bishop in London warned Granada of the dangers of it all seeming too realistic; a woman in Halifax gave birth in an ambulance, having delayed her departure to hospital to witness the lovers’ first illicit kiss; and the Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, one of the Street’s greatest fans, declared that Ken Barlow deserved better.

The fling excited the divided consternation of Fleet Street’s finest, with Jean Rook of the Daily Express advising Deirdre to “stick with Ken” and her Daily Mail rival Lynda Lee Potter urging her to leave boring Ken for exciting Mike.

In the showdown between the two, Anne Kirkbride thought Bill Roache had gone mad when — unrehearsed and unscripted — he grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the Barlows’ front door as Baldwin stood on the step. “I was literally fighting to get away,” she remembered. Tracked by the cameras, she ran to an adjoining room and burst into tears.

^{The 'Free the Weatherfield One' storyline gripped the nation}

When Deirdre and Barlow were reconciled in the next episode, the Daily Mail hired the electronic scoreboard at Old Trafford and, to the approving roar of 56,000 fans watching Manchester United play Arsenal, flashed up the news: “Deirdre and Ken united again!”

In 1987, when Deirdre — by now working as a shop assistant - became Councillor Barlow, Anne Kirkbride complained at this improbable turn of events, but soon realised that it got Deirdre out from behind the bacon slicer and into the swim of mainstream Street life. However, she remained upset at the decision to have Deirdre divorce Ken over his affair with his secretary.

Her character received a fresh lease of life in 1994 when Anne Kirkbride returned from a six months’ absence due to illness; at 39, she had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, but, after chemotherapy, recovered. On screen, however, a planned reconciliation with Ken Barlow had to be scrapped, and instead Deirdre embarked on a holiday romance with a 21-year-old toyboy, a Moroccan waiter, Samir Rachid (Al Nedjari), whom she later married.

“Anne Kirkbride is celebrating her return to health with a crackling storyline, a marvellous performance and a whole new vocabulary,” wrote Margaret Forwood in the Express.

The marriage was short-lived, however, and in 1995 Deirdre’s third husband died on his way to hospital to donate a kidney to Deirdre’s wayward daughter Tracy. She was reunited with Ken in 1999 and married him for a second time in 2005, despite Ken finding out that she had slept with the supersmooth corner shop owner Dev Alahan.

Anne Kirkbride was called as a character witness in Roache’s trial on sex assault charges in 2014 (he was found not guilty): she said her colleague was “always a perfect gentleman”.

As an actress, Anne Kirkbride possessed a photographic memory; she could read through a page of script and almost instantly know it by heart.

Oldham Rep

Anne Kirkbride was born on June 21 1954 at Oldham, Lancashire, the daughter of Jack Kirkbride, a painter and decorator who became a cartoonist for the Oldham Evening Chronicle. It was her father who encouraged her to go on the stage, having spotted her acting talent when she was only seven.

She developed it at Oldham Rep’s junior theatregoers’ club, and at the age of 11 joined the Saddleworth junior players and then the Oldham youth theatre. On leaving Count Hill grammar school she took a job at Oldham Rep as a student assistant stage manager at £1 a week, combining buying props and helping to build sets with several small acting parts.

When the company’s director, Carl Paulson, took her aside and told her she would be acting full-time on £18 a week, she said she ran through the streets “as if I’d just won the pools”. A Coronation Street talent scout saw her in a Jack Rosenthal play and she was asked to read for a walk-on part.

She hated her gravelly voice but revelled in the nine-to-five routine of a soap star, and never wanted to play Shakespeare or longed for the peripatetic life of a repertory actress. “Sometimes I think I should have made more of an effort to get out and do other stuff,” she admitted in 2001, “but then again I’ve never been terribly ambitious.” In a television confessional, Deirdre and Me (2001), Anne Kirkbride admitted to a compulsion to scrub and clean incessantly (even the lavatories at the Granada studios), and to the depression that in 1998 almost ruined her appearance on This Is Your Life, an ordeal she managed to survive only with the aid of Valium.

She took a leave of absence from Coronation Street in September 2014 and was written out of the script, but had been expected to return.

A lifelong heavy smoker, she also confessed to suicidal feelings and to a compulsion to iron her knickers.

In 1992 Anne Kirkbride married the actor David Beckett, whom she met on the Coronation Street set when he briefly played a handyman in the soap. He survives her.

Anne Kirkbride, born June 21 1954, died January 19 2015