He was not on the list.
The actor George Cole, who has died aged 90, was most
effective in two sorts of role: the exploiter and the exploited. He is likely
to be remembered chiefly as the dodgy used car dealer Arthur Daley in the
popular television series Minder (1979-94), always on the lookout for a “nice
little earner”. But at the beginning of his acting career he was most often
seen as the reverse: a wide-eyed and wobbly-lipped boyish acolyte of sometimes
sinister manipulators in plays such as Mr Bolfry, Dr Angelus and The Anatomist;
or a doleful young serviceman trying to keep his courage up in war films that
included Morning Departure (1950), the story of trapped submariners.
He left school at 14 and was due to start work in a
butcher’s shop. But in the meantime he worked as a paper boy, and in one of the
London evening newspapers he was delivering he saw an advertisement offering an
opening in a West End production of the Ralph Benatzky and Robert Stolz musical
White Horse Inn. He pedalled straight to the theatre. No one at the stage door
seemed disposed to take him seriously, but he hung around until he was taken
inside. He got a job as an understudy at 28s 6d a week and went on tour. Cole
did not tell his parents before setting off, but sent them a telegram from
Blackpool.
The White Horse Inn tour was interrupted by the outbreak of
the second world war. But in June 1940, still far too young to be called up, he
got a part in the play Cottage to Let, as a truculent cockney wartime evacuee,
and then appeared in the 1941 film version. Alastair Sim, the tall,
plummy-voiced comic actor who had a genius for playing eccentrics, was also in
the cast. Sim and his wife, Naomi, took Cole under their wing. He stayed at
their Oxfordshire home during the blitz; years later, he built his first
marital home nearby. Sim helped Cole lose his London accent and taught him
comedy technique.
After a spell in the RAF – during which he made one film for
its film unit, Journey Together (1945) – he appeared with Sim in Scrooge (also
known as A Christmas Carol, 1951) and in Laughter in Paradise (also 1951), in
which a mischief-maker makes bequests to his stuffy family in his will, on
condition that they carry out grotesque acts; Cole was a strait-laced bank
clerk encouraged to commit robbery. Through the 1950s and 1960s he appeared in
dozens of stage and film roles exploiting his little-boy-lost persona,
departing from this by appearing in four of the popular St Trinian’s films as
the spiv “Flash Harry” aiding and abetting the unruly schoolgirls (with the
character’s appearance usually announced by his own theme music). During this
lucrative period, he took a job with the Glasgow Citizens theatre at £10 a week
to learn more about his craft.
Success in the cinema was patchy. Rank gave him a five-film
contract but dropped him after two. Associated British Pathé gave him a
contract for seven but dropped him after three. When he made Top Secret (1952),
especially written for him, about a naive sanitary engineer with a
revolutionary new idea which the Russians think is an improved atom bomb, even
the film fan magazine Picturegoer questioned whether he could carry a film as
its star.
It was not until he took to radio and television that his
victimised and victimising personalities found their natural media. His BBC
radio series A Life of Bliss, in which he played David Bliss, a diffident young
bachelor ruled by his mother and his dog, Psyche (“voiced” by Percy Edwards),
ran for many years from 1953 and also moved to television (1960-61). His choice
of parts was often self-limiting – he once turned down Othello – but for ITV he
was more adventurous in A Man of Our Times (1968), a series in which a
middle-aged man is faced with a dilemma: accept redundancy or a lower status
with his firm. It won him a wide audience, good notices and a great deal of
personal satisfaction.
But nothing bettered the wide popular appeal of the
unscrupulous conman “Arfur” Daley in Minder, in which he was paired with Dennis
Waterman (who also sang the show’s theme tune) as his “minder”, Terry McCann.
Here the two poles of his personality fused to create a character with both a
rabbity caution and an agile exploitative brain. Cole used to say that he might
well have turned into “Arfur” but for Sim, pointing out that while in the RAF
from 1943 to 1947 he had helped to run a mess bar and become familiar with all
sorts of dodges. So closely did Cole become identified with the part that the
first “autobiography” that appeared with Cole’s photograph on the cover was
Straight Up (1991), in fact the fictional life story of Daley, an oblique
comment on modern fame, about which Cole did not complain. He published his own
autobiography, The World Was My Lobster, in 2014.
The success of Daley did not limit Cole’s future work when
the Minder series – which at its peak attracted an audience of more than 16
million – ended after 15 years. In this respect he was more fortunate than many
other actors who have become firmly associated with one television role. In My
Good Friend, launched in 1995, he played Peter Banks, who, he said, was very
much like him – a proud pensioner suffering from an endearing irritability with
life. Banks had been forcibly retired by the Post Office and responded by
encouraging his friends to go on various anarchic escapades, such as getting
drunk at midday, playing football in the park and trying to find a husband for
his landlady.
David Yallop, who had written 13 episodes of Minder, decided
to expand one episode in which Daley stood for the local council but was
disqualified for overspending. From this idea he created the series An
Independent Man (1995-96), in which Cole is a slightly dodgy hairdresser who
tries to reform his local authority and uncovers all kinds of abuses.
Cole appeared with Julia Roberts in the film Mary Reilly
(1996), his first Hollywood assignment since he had played a talking dog in The
Blue Bird (1975), which starred Elizabeth Taylor. In 1997 he appeared as a
75-year-old Chelsea pensioner in Stephen Churchett’s play Heritage – the oldest
character he had played. He kept on working on TV and in 2008 told Mark Lawson
in an interview for BBC TV: “I don’t want to stop. I am still enjoying every
second of it.” In 2007 he played Sir Edward Chambers in New Tricks, opposite
his old Minder partner Waterman, who he said was “a dream” to work with.
Earlier this year, he was cast in a crime-horror film, Road Rage, which has yet
to be released.
Cole was appointed OBE in 1992. He is survived by his second
wife, the actor Penny Morrell, whom he married in 1967, and their son, Toby,
and daughter, Tara; by a son, Crispin, and daughter, Harriet, from his first
marriage, to the actor Eileen Moore, which ended in divorce; and by three
grandchildren, Harry, Amelia and Thomas.
Partial filmography
Cottage to Let
(1941) - Ronald
Those Kids from
Town (1942) - Charlie
The Demi-Paradise
(1943) - Percy (uncredited)
Henry V (1944) -
Boy
Journey Together
(1945) - Curley, Bomb Aimer, Lancaster Crew
My Brother's Keeper
(1948) - Willie Stannard
Quartet (1948) -
Herbert Sunbury (segment "The Kite")
The Spider and the
Fly (1949) - Marc, detective
Morning Departure
(1950) - E.R.A. Marks
The Happiest Days
of Your Life (1950) - Junior Assistant Caretaker at Ministry of Education
(uncredited)
Gone to Earth (US:
The Wild Heart, 1950) - Cousin Albert
Flesh and Blood
(1951) - John Hannah
Laughter in
Paradise (1951) - Herbert Russell
Lady Godiva Rides
Again (1951) - Johnny
Scrooge (1951) -
Young Ebenezer Scrooge
The Happy Family
(1952) - Cyril
Who Goes There!
(1952) - Arthur Crisp
Top Secret (1952)
- George
Folly to Be Wise
(1953) - Soldier in Brains Trust audience (uncredited)
Will Any
Gentleman...? (1953) - Henry Sterling
The Intruder
(1953) - John Summers
The Clue of the
Missing Ape (1953) - Gobo
Our Girl Friday
(1953) - Jimmy Carrol
An Inspector Calls
(1954) - Tram Conductor (uncredited)
Happy Ever After (1954) - Terence
The Belles of St
Trinian's (1954) - Flash Harry
A Prize of Gold
(1955) - Sergeant Roger Morris
Where There's a
Will (1955) - Fred Slater
The Constant
Husband (1955) - Luigi Sopranelli
The Adventures of
Quentin Durward (1955) - Hayraddin
It's a Wonderful
World (1956) - Ken Millar
The Weapon (1956)
- Joshua Henry
The Green Man
(1956) - William Blake
Blue Murder at St
Trinian's (1957) - 'Flash' Harry
Too Many Crooks
(1959) - Fingers
The Bridal Path (1959) - Police Sgt. Bruce
Don't Panic Chaps!
(1959) - Finch
The Pure Hell of
St Trinian's (1960) - 'Flash' Harry Cuthbert Edwards
Cleopatra (1963) -
Flavius
Dr. Syn, Alias the
Scarecrow - The Scarecrow of Romney
Marsh (1963) - Mr. Sexton Mipps / Hellspite
One Way Pendulum
(1964) - Defense Counsel / Fred
Gideon's Way,
episode "The Firebug" (1964) - Arsonist / Bishop
The Great St
Trinian's Train Robbery (1966) - 'Flash' Harry
The Caramel Crisis
(1966) - Caramel
The Vampire Lovers
(1970) - Roger Morton
UFO (episode 17 -
flight path) (1971, TV Series)
Fright (1971) -
Jim
Take Me High
(1974) - Bert Jackson
The Blue Bird
(1976) - Tylo
The Sweeney (1976)
- Dennis Longfield
Double Nickels
(1977) - George
Don't Forget to
Write! (1977-1979, TV Series) - George Maple
Minder (1979-1994,
TV Series) - Arthur Daley
Minder on the
Orient Express (TV 1985) - Arthur Daley
An Officer and a
Car Salesman (Minder spin off) (TV 1988) - Arthur Daley
Deadline Auto
Theft (1983) - Atlee Jackson
Blott on the
Landscape (1985, TV Series) - Sir Giles Lynchwood / Sir Giles
Tube Mice (1988,
TV Series) - Vernon (Voice)
The End of
Innocence (1990) - Dad
Root Into Europe
(1992, TV Series) - Henry Root
My Good Friend
(1995-1996, TV Series) - Peter Banks
Mary Reilly (1996)
- Mr. Poole
Dad (1997-1998, TV
Series) - Brian Hook
The Ghost of
Greville Lodge (2000) - Great Uncle
Marple (2007) -
Laurence Raeburn
Midsomer Murders
(2008) - Lionel Hicks
Heartbeat
(2005-2008, TV Series) - Albert Hallows (final appearance)
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