Postman Pat voice actor Ken Barrie

Image captionBarrie famously sang the theme tune for the show as well as providing voices for the characters

Ken Barrie, the voice of children's TV favourite Postman Pat, has died at the age of 73.

Barrie, who was born Leslie Hulme, provided the voice for Pat and many of the other characters in the animated series.

He also famously sang the show's theme tune, which was released as a single and spent 15 weeks in the top 75.

A family member told BBC News Barrie died at his home in Uxbridge, London, after a short battle with cancer.

Barrie, who had a singing career with Embassy Records under the name of Les Carle, became the voice of Pat in 1981.

Barrie was the narrator of the original 13-episode series and also supplied voices for famous characters such as handyman Ted Glen, the Reverend Peter Timms and farmer Alf Thompson.

He reprised his role in the 1990s when a second series was made and in a rebooted version of the show which began in 2004 before handing over the voice of Pat to actor Lewis MacLeod.

He also provided the soundtrack for the 1987 animation Charlie Chalk and later topped the charts as part of Peter Kay's Animated All Star Band on the Official BBC Children in Need Medley in 2009.

Luc Hoffmann, ornithologist and co-founder of the WWF

Luc Hoffmann 

Luc Hoffmann, who has died aged 93, was a Swiss ornithologist who conducted some of the earliest studies of waterbird populations and wetland ecology, co-founded the World Wildlife Fund and became a key figure in the battle to preserve precious European wetlands, including the French Camargue and the Coto Doñana in Spain.

He was also a driving force behind the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the world’s only international environmental treaty for a single type of ecosystem.

 Hans Lukas Hoffmann was born on January 23 1923 in Basel, the second son of the businessman and art connoisseur Emanuel Hoffmann and the sculptor Maja Stehlin. His grandfather had founded the pharmaceuticals company Hoffmann-la Roche in 1896 (the family remains the majority shareholder). His father died in a car accident in 1932 and the next year his older brother died of leukaemia. His mother then married the Swiss composer Paul Sacher.

Although he was born into great wealth (his parents had collected works by Picasso, Arp and Braque), Luc was raised frugally. He became a keen birdwatcher as a child and published his first academic paper, “The passage of seabirds in the vicinity of Basel”, in 1941 while still at school.

The same year he went up to Basel University to study Botany and Zoology. After graduation and two years’ service in the Swiss Army, after the Second World War Hoffmann travelled to the Camargue, the vast delta south of Arles where the Rhône River splits in two, to do a PhD on the feathers of the common tern.

Sunset and Phoenicopterus over the Camargue 

Using his share of the Hoffmann family wealth (from 1953 to 1996, he was on the board of Hoffmann-la Roche), he bought 1,200 acres of land and built a house, a school, and a biological research station, Tour du Valat, which opened in 1954 and has attracted generations of ecologists from around the world to study.

The previous year Hoffmann had married Daria Razumovsky, the daughter of Count Andreas Razumovsky and Princess Katharina Nikolajevna Sayn-Wittgenstein, who had fled Russia in 1918 after the October Revolution and later settled in Vienna. He brought her to the Camargue, and they started a family.

Hoffmann did much to secure the status of the Camargue as a national park, while conservation work undertaken at Tour du Valat is said to have ensured the continued presence of the greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) in France. Hoffmann also supported the breeding of Przewalski’s horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) nearby and their reintroduction to their native Mongolia in 2004.

In the 1950s Hoffmann became a key figure in the fight to save Doñana, an estuarial area south of Seville, which was threatened by plans for extensive eucalypt plantations. Doñana is home to the world’s most endangered cat, the Iberian Lynx, and a stopping point for six million migrating birds.

The campaign drew together an international coalition of leading naturalists, including Peter Scott, Julian Huxley, Max Nicholson and others, which led, in 1961 to the founding of the World Wildlife Fund. Hoffmann was a founder member and trustee and served as its vice-president from its foundation until 1988. Doñana was established as a nature reserve in 1969 when the WWF joined forces with the Spanish government and purchased a section of marshland to protect it. Hoffmann then became the driving force in lobbying governments for a framework to protect wetlands of international significance and the International Convention on Wetlands (the Ramsar Convention), signed in 1971, was the result.

Flamingoes on the Cota Donana 

The author of more than 60 books and other publications on birds and their habitats, Hoffmann travelled extensively for the WWF and served as director of Wetlands International and Vice-President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He established the Fondation Internationale du Banc d’Arguin in West Africa, and the Mava foundation, which funds nature conservation projects worldwide. In 2012 the foundation, along with WWF International, established the Luc Hoffmann Institute.

In 1996 he joined the Association for the Creation of the Foundation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles and was instrumental in establishing the association as a state-funded foundation, picking up the bill for the €11 million renovation of the Hotel de Léautaud de Donines, which the city of Arles put at the foundation’s disposal in exchange for the refurbishment.

Hoffmann was the recipient of many prizes and awards including the Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal awarded by the WWF (1998). He was a Chevalier of the French Légion d’honneur and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Earlier this year he was awarded the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation award for biodiversity conservation.

Hoffmann’s wife died in 2002. He is survived by their son and three daughters.

Luc Hoffmann, born January 23 1923, died July 21 2016

Dimitri the Clown

Dimitri the Clown 

Dimitri the Clown, who has died aged 80, was one of the world’s great mime artists and circus entertainers.

With his pudding basin haircut, ear-to-ear smile, his innocent humour and skills as an acrobat, juggler and musician, Dimitri entertained generations of circus and theatre goers around the world.

“The plight of a man, plucking his mandolin successfully, who keeps losing his plectrum inside the instrument, becomes an exercise in hilarity,” wrote one critic. “It’s the kind of thing which could happen to anyone and, in the expert hands of Dimitri, evokes delight in all ages.”

“I think you are born a clown,” he told in interviewer in 2012. “I have always loved to make people laugh.”

Dimitri the Clown performing in Zurich in 2003

He was born Dimitri Jakob Müller on September 18 1935 at Ascona, on Lake Maggiore, where his parents, Werner, a sculptor, and Maja, an artist, were prominent members of the local artistic community.

Aged seven, he was taken to the circus. “I saw Clown Andreff and was fascinated by the fact that he had made it his profession to do what I loved the most,” Dmitri recalled. “I knew then that I wanted to become a clown.”

His parents had no idea how to help him, so they arranged lessons in basic skills – dance, acrobatics, ballet, acting, Flamenco guitar, mime, folk dance and gymnastics. After he left the Rudolf Steiner School in Zurich, he was even apprenticed to a potter: “a bit of a detour, but the rest of the activities seemed like the most direct way into buffoonery”.

In Paris, where he studied mime with Etienne Decroux, the 23-year-old Dimitri met Marcel Marceau and was offered a place in Marceau’s course and later in his troupe: “He told me, 'Dimitri, you could be a mime, but you would merely be average. But if you really put your back into becoming a clown, you will be a great one.’ That’s all I needed to hear.”

After his time with Marceau, Dimitri appeared as Auguste (the slapstick troublemaker among clowns) to the Whiteface clown Louis Maisse at galas and on tour with Cirque Mendrano, as well as staging his first solo programme as a mime artist in Ascona in 1959.

Dimitri in Verscio, Switzerland, in 2010 

In 1961 he married his childhood sweetheart Gunda, with whom he had four children. By the early 1960s he was performing at leading Paris theatres.

In 1969 Fredy Knie invited Dimitri to join the Swiss Circus Knie – the first time a theatre clown had featured in the circus’s programme. He made such an impact that after his initial showing (in which he was partnered by an elephant), the Knies brought him back in 1973, when he worked with a cow, a pig and a donkey and was joined in the ring by his children. He also toured Switzerland with Circus Knie in 1979.

In the meantime, in 1971 Dimitri and his wife had founded the Teatro Dimitri in the Swiss town of Verscio. Four years later they established the Scuola Teatro Dimitri, a circus school for young artistes, followed, in 1978, by the Compagnia Teatro Dimitri.

Their success led to invitations to perform all over the world. In 1974 Dimitri appeared for the first time in the US, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, followed by a major tour in 1975. He made his debut in Britain in 1982 in the first of several tours beginning at the Bernard Sax Shaw Theatre in London. In 1995 he did a tour of war-torn Sarajevo as an ambassador for Unicef. “All people like to laugh and a humour that is innocent, situational and kind defies cultural and national borders,” he said. “If something is truly funny, it will always be funny.”

In later life Dimitri directed and choreographed shows for the Wiener Kammeroper and other European theatres, and directed shows for the Swiss Circus Monti.

Three of Dmitri’s children, his two daughters, Masha and Nina, and his son David, became successful performing artists, and in 2006 they appeared alongside their father in La Famiglia Dimitri, a burlesque show featuring juggling, cycling, singing, and high wire acts, that enjoyed a successful run on Broadway.

In 1973, he was awarded the Grock prize, and he was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame in 1995.

He is survived by his wife and children.

Dimitri the clown, born September 18 1935, died July 19 2016

Thomas Sutherland, Beirut hostage

Thomas Sutherland arrives home after six years as a hostage   

Thomas Sutherland, who has died aged 85, was a Scottish-born American academic and dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut when in 1985 he was kidnapped by Iranian-backed Hizbollah militants in Lebanon and held for more than six years.

Sutherland was among dozens of Westerners taken hostage in Beirut in the 1980s at the height of Lebanon’s civil war. He was abducted while driving from the airport to his home in Beirut on June 9 1985.

 For the next six years he was held in a series of dark rooms, often blindfolded and chained to a wall, along with other Western hostages, notably the journalist Terry Anderson, the BBC reporter John McCarthy and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s peace envoy Terry Waite, who had become involved in hostage negotiation, but was himself taken hostage in 1987.

In the early days of their ordeal, the Western hostages were regularly abused by their captors and Sutherland later admitted that he had contemplated suicide more than once. What had kept him alive was his friendship with Anderson, a war correspondent and Vietnam veteran.

To cope with the boredom, Sutherland gave Anderson lessons in French and animal husbandry while Anderson taught Sutherland how to play chess and bridge. “If it hadn’t been for Terry, I probably would have committed suicide,” he said after his eventual release. “Every time I got discouraged and put my head down on the pillow and said, 'I’m done with all this’, Terry encouraged me, and that’s the reason I am alive today.”

His views on Terry Waite, to whom he was shackled for more than a year, were less positive. After the two men were released on November 18 1991, under a deal brokered by the UN, Sutherland shocked a Washington conference with a bitter attack on the Church of England envoy, admitting that he had come “near to blows” with Waite on several occasions.

“He seemed to lack sensitivity and did not know when we wanted silence,” he explained. “He was afraid he would get abrupt replies from Anderson and McCarthy so he picked on me to talk to. He is a super-egoist. I’m convinced he negotiated for hostages for the publicity value.” Waite, he also told Time magazine, had been the “bane” of the captives’ existence and when he moved, “it was like a goddam herd of elephants”.

 The son of a Scottish dairy farmer, Thomas McNee Sutherland was born at Falkirk on May 3 1931 and educated at Falkirk High School, where he was a talented footballer. After leaving school, he signed for Rangers while reading Agriculture at Glasgow University, but eventually decided to stick to his studies.

 After graduating in 1953, he travelled to America where he took a PhD in animal science from Iowa State University. He then joined the agriculture faculty at Colorado State University, where he became a professor of animal genetics.

In 1983 he took leave of absence to go to Lebanon to help to set up a new teaching department at the American University of Beirut. He was taken hostage two years later.

After his release, Sutherland returned to his job at Colorado State University, where he became professor emeritus after his retirement.

In 2001 members of the Sutherland family were awarded substantial sums in compensation by an American court from frozen Iranian assets over Iran’s role in financing Hizbollah, including more than $23 million for Sutherland himself, most of which he gave away to charity. He and his wife also wrote a joint memoir about their time in the Middle East called At Your Own Risk.

Sutherland is survived by his wife Jean and by three daughters.

Thomas Sutherland, born May 3 1931, died July 23 2016

Anton Yelchin, actor

Anton Yelchin in Star Trek (2009)

Anton Yelchin, who has died in an accident aged 27, was best known for playing Pavel Chekov in the most recent series of Star Trek films, but he had also made his mark with a striking range of performances in independent cinema.

Like many of the actors in J J Abrams’s “re-boot” of the Star Trek franchise in 2009, Yelchin was perfectly cast as the 17-year-old whizz-kid navigator aboard Enterprise. The character, who is Russian, had been included in the original television series in a hopeful nod to a post-Cold War future.

Anton Yelchin in Star Trek 

Yet while Walter Koenig, who had portrayed him in the television series, is not Russian, Yelchin had been born in Russia. But he had grown up in America, and so had to adopt a Russian accent, often for comic effect. As cultured and likeable off-screen as he was on it, Yelchin also appeared in the film’s sequel and had reprised the role for the forthcoming Star Trek Beyond.

An only child, Anton Yelchin was born in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) on March 11 1989. His parents were both skaters with the city’s ice ballet and at one stage the third-ranked pair in the Soviet Union. They qualified for the 1972 Winter Olympics but were not allowed to travel to the Games.

This was perhaps because they were Jewish and it was feared that they would defect. Six months after their son’s birth they were given refugee status by the US and settled in California, where they worked as skating coaches. Anton inherited none of their athletic ability and his mother began taking him to acting classes to overcome his shyness.

When he was still an infant, a passer-by told his mother that he was beautiful and would become an actor. He quickly found work in television commercials and made his screen debut in 2001 aged 12 in Along Came a Spider, a thriller starring Morgan Freeman as the detective Alex Cross.

Anton Yelchin in 2014 

Much more significant for his development was the other film he made that year. In Hearts in Atlantis, based on a Stephen King story, he starred with Anthony Hopkins, whom he insisted on calling “Sir Anthony” on set. Hopkins taught him to play the Moonlight Sonata on the piano, while Albert Finney introduced him to the music of the Beatles.

In his teens, Yelchin appeared in Steven Spielberg’s television mini-series Taken, about alien abduction, as well as in episodes of shows such as Law & Order and Criminal Minds. In 2007 he enrolled at the University of Southern California to read Film, but never began the course after landing his first two starring roles.

As the titular Charlie Bartlett, a Ferris Bueller-ish smart alec, Yelchin held his own with Robert Downey, Jr, and revealed a talent for comedy. Meanwhile for Alpha Dog, with Amber Heard, he earned praise for his portrayal of a real-life murder victim.

Besides the Star Trek series, he got another taste of blockbuster franchises when cast in Terminator: Salvation (2009) as the teenage incarnation of the father of the hero of the series, John Connor, played by Christian Bale. The shoot made the headlines when Bale was recorded ranting at a cameraman who had earned his displeasure. Yet in interviews Yelchin stoutly defended his co-star’s reputation, as he did Mel Gibson’s after the star was accused of domestic violence while the pair were making a film about alcoholism, The Beaver (2011).

Thereafter Yelchin continued to demonstrate his versatility in a series of largely independent films, shedding some of the gawkiness that had characterised him and growing towards leading man status.

In Like Crazy, with Felicity Jones and Jennifer Lawrence, he evoked the agonies of love at long distance. Again in 2011, he was the suburban boy who finds that his neighbour, Colin Farrell, is a vampire in the under-appreciated remake of Fright Night.

In Only Lovers Left Alive, he encountered more vampires, this time Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, amid the music scene in Detroit, while in his last major role he was pitched into more horror as the leader of a punk band trapped by neo-Nazis (led by Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart) in the smartly-written Green Room (2015).

Yelchin was killed by his car after it rolled back on to him in his driveway in Los Angeles when he got out to open the gate. He was not married.

Anton Yelchin, born March 11 1989, died June 19 2016

Jo Cox, Labour MP

Jo Cox 

Jo Cox, who has died aged 41, was a former head of policy and head of humanitarian campaigning for the global charity Oxfam who was elected Labour MP for Batley and Spen at the last general election; she established herself as a rising star of her party, albeit one unlikely to prosper under its current leadership.

Before she entered Parliament, Jo Cox had spent a decade working in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones, and in Parliament she made a name for herself campaigning to find a solution to the conflict in Syria and demanding the government do more to ensure that humanitarian aid reached people who needed it, including calling for RAF airdrops. She also established and became co-chairman of a new all-party parliamentary group on Syria.

“I’ve been in some horrific situations where women have been raped repeatedly in Darfur,” she told the Yorkshire Post in December last year. “I’ve been with child soldiers who have been given Kalashnikovs and kill members of their own family in Uganda. In Afghanistan I was talking to Afghan elders who were world weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own Government and from the international community to stop problems early. That’s the thing that all of that experience gave me – if you ignore a problem it gets worse.”

Her concern led her to put aside party divisions to campaign with leading Conservatives, though when in October last year she wrote a joint article with the former international development secretary Andrew Mitchell for The Observer, calling for humanitarian intervention in Syria with the establishment of “safe havens”, she was attacked by Labour’s international development spokesman, Diane Abbott, for siding with a Tory.

Jo Cox wins Batley and Spen last year 

She had already upset the Corbynite wing of the party by voting for the Blairite Liz Kendall in the leadership election, even though she had been one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn as a candidate.

In May this year she went on to co-write a column in The Guardian expressing regret for nominating the Labour leader and criticising his leadership. “Weak leadership, poor judgment and a mistaken sense of priorities have created distraction after distraction and stopped us getting our message across,” she wrote.

Later, in an interview with The Independent’s website, she warned that Corbyn could face a leadership challenge if Britain votes to leave the EU because of his failure to mobilise voters for the Remain campaign. “I want to see those Labour voters come out and vote Remain, “ she said. “If they don’t, and we leave [the EU], that is a conversation for June 24... Ultimately there are many of us who think that Jeremy needs to take responsibility,” she said.

I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap yearJo Cox

Helen Joanne Leadbetter, always known as “Jo”, was born on June 22 1974 in Batley, Yorkshire. Her mother, Jean, was a school secretary and her father, Gordon, was a factory worker in Leeds.

Jo was educated at Heckmondwike Grammar School and at Cambridge University, although she did not enjoy the experience, and came to a “realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered. I didn’t really speak right or knew the right people. I spent the summers packing toothpaste at a factory working where my dad worked and everyone else had gone on a gap year. To be honest my experience at Cambridge really knocked me for about five years.”

It also led her to joining the Labour Party. After leaving university, she worked for Oxfam, becoming head of policy and was also an advisor to Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah, and Lady Kinnock. She became national chairwoman of Labour Women’s Network and a senior adviser to the Freedom Fund, an anti-slavery charity.

She was selected to fight the safe Labour seat of Batley and Spen at the 2015 election after the previous MP, Mike Wood, announced his retirement, and increased the Labour majority by 2,000 votes.

Jo Cox 

In Parliament, she became a member of the Communities and Local Government select committee and used her maiden speech to urge the government to match rhetoric about building a “Northern Powerhouse” with action, including more regional devolution and increased funding for local authorities.

“Having gone through that experience of being in a Cambridge college, surviving it and building myself up, meant that coming here (Westminster) was a walk in the park,” she explained to the Yorkshire Post, “ and a lot of the same people are here.”

A keen mountain climber, Jo Cox lived in a converted barge moored at Tower Bridge with her husband Brendan and two young children, Lejla and Cuillin.

On June 16 she was stabbed and shot in the street near to where she held her weekly surgery at Birstall, West Yorkshire. An air ambulance transported her to Leeds General Infirmary but she died of her injuries.

Jo Cox, born June 22 1974, died June 16 2016

Abel Fernández, actor

Abel Fernández as Agent Youngfellow in The Untouchables

Abel Fernández, who has died aged 85, was a half Yakaii Indian and half Mexican professional boxer who became a successful Hollywood character actor.

From modest beginnings Fernández went on to have a 45-year film career, co-starring opposite Robert Mitchum in Second Chance (1953), Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall (1956) and Gregory Peck in Pork Chop Hill (1959).

He also had something of a cult following on the popular ABC television series The Untouchables (1959-1963), set in 1930s Prohibition-era Chicago, for his role as Federal Agent William “Bill” Youngfellow, a character based on William Jennings Gardner, a real-life Native American member of the Untouchable Federal Squad. “The show was the biggest thing on TV at the time,” Fernández recalled. “Even John F. Kennedy was said to be a fan of mine.”

Abel Fernández and Robert Stack in The Untouchables (1959) 

Abel Gonzalez Fernández was born on July 14 1930 in Los Angeles, California. His mother was a Yakaii Indian, and his father was a Mexican. Abel was the youngest of a large family and his mother died giving birth to him.

At the age of 16 Fernández enlisted in the US Army, serving at the end of the Second World War in the 11th Airborne as a paratrooper. He also boxed regularly, often sparring with the heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano.

He went on to win the middleweight boxing championships in the Asiatic forces aged 19 and continued in the sport after his discharge from the army in 1950, winning the Los Angeles Golden Gloves tournament. An almost fatal injury inflicted on an opponent in the ring put paid to his boxing career, however, and so he decided to become an actor instead.

Fernández made his screen debut playing a boxer in Second Chance (1953). Next came the Robert Ryan and Jan Sterling B-movie potboiler Alaska Seas (1954) and, following a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, a minor role as an Indian warrior in Rose Marie (1954). He also appeared in the comedy-western Many Rivers to Cross (1955).

Abel Fernández and Peggy Ann Garner in The Untouchables in 1963

By the mid-1950s, Fernández had left MGM and was often finding himself typecast as “the Indian”, “Medicine Man” or “Apache” in such titles as Strange Lady in Town (1955), with Greer Garson, for Warner Bros. He took a leading role as Mangas, the son of an Apache chief who wages war on a disgruntled settler (Peter Graves) in Fort Yuma (1955), and another Apache in The Last Wagon (1956), with Richard Widmark and Susan Kohner. He was Chief Firebird, an Indian boxer who refuses to throw a match in The Harder They Fall.

A flurry of TV shows followed, including Cheyenne; The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin; 77 Sunset Strip; Wagon Train; Gunsmoke; Bonanza and a role as Airman Abel Featherstone on the NBC series Steve Canyon.

On the big screen he appeared in the Bud Boetticher western Decision at Sundown (1957) with Randolph Scott, and the Film Noir The Tijuana Story (both 1957). His career continued with The Untouchables, but also television shows such as Batman and The Big Valley and small roles in films such as Quicksilver (1986) and Buster Bedroom (1991), a black comedy about a woman who is obsessed with the silent film star Buster Keaton.

In 1981, however, despite much hype, plans for a reunion movie featuring Fernández and other original Untouchables cast members failed to come to fruition when Robert Stack declined to reprise his role as Eliot Ness.

Fernandez was inducted into the California Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013.

His last appearance on screen was in 2002 in an episode of a Mexican soap opera. Thereafter he dedicated much of his time to producing films for disadvantaged children.

Abel Fernández was married twice. He is survived by four children.

Abel Fernández, born July 14 1930, died May 3 2016