Gerald Harper obit

Gerald Harper, actor best known as the suave squire Hadleigh and the out-of-time crime fighter Adam Adamant

 

He was not on the list.

Gerald Harper, who has died aged 96, was a British actor whose silky manner, smooth voice, immaculate dress and self-assured, lady-killing charm personified the well-heeled Englishman.

In Yorkshire Television’s series Hadleigh (1969-76), he portrayed the young huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ squire James Hadleigh, stylishly facing the problems of keeping up his stately home. Playing the elegant cad superbly, Harper delighted a peak audience of 17 million viewers by transporting them to a world that was light years from their own.

Always dismissing his butler with a terse “Thank you, Sutton”, Harper based his on-screen master-servant relationship on his close observation of Lord Lucan during a game of golf. “While I was chatting my head off to my caddy, there’s old Lucan waving his hand imperiously and treating his caddy as if he wasn’t there. I realised there and then the difference between acting a gent and being one.”

He first played Hadleigh in 1968 in the series Gazette, as the proprietor of a weekly newspaper in Yorkshire. The character proved so popular that he was upgraded to squire and given his own eponymous spin-off. The Daily Telegraph critic Richard Last delighted in the series as “a rebellion not only against fashionable working-class melodrama but even more against the successful social and business climber who is the obligatory hero of so many TV drama series”.

Its ratings allowed Harper to tear up his contract with Yorkshire Television’s bosses and start again, with a vastly increased salary and “the loan of a country estate for a year complete with staff,” he recalled. “I lived like a lord.”

Harper had enjoyed earlier success with the title role in Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67), about a swashbuckling Edwardian crime fighter who finds himself in Swinging London after being frozen in a block of ice for 64 years by his anonymous nemesis “The Face”. Produced by Doctor Who’s begetter Verity Lambert, the series successfully exploited the clash of mores from different eras and proved extremely popular Saturday-night viewing.

“Gerald Harper [has] the right wooden good looks and mad blue eye and voices the authentic bombast (‘My resolve is as blue steel…’),” wrote The Sunday Telegraph’s Philip Purser, adding approvingly that “when Adam displays, in 1966, his 1902 attitudes to women, propriety, manners and patriotism, he is not the one who suffers from the comparison.”

Having set the tone for his career by making his London stage debut in How He Lied to Her Husband (Arts Theatre, 1951), he remained the consummate ladykiller. Hugh Massingberd once argued in the Telegraph that Harper should have been cast as James Bond in the Sixties: “I believe that Fleming’s Etonian original would have been much better played by a proper ‘smoothie’ such as Gerald Harper.”

Nevertheless he became better-known later in his career as a radio disc jockey rather than a leading man. He was one of the biggest names in Capital Radio’s line-up when it launched in 1973, sending doting housewives dotty with his customary charm on his weekly show A Sunday Affair with Gerald Harper.

He became renowned for sending roses and champagne to listeners who were celebrating anniversaries or who had carried out notable good deeds, including the odd deserving celebrity such as Mrs Mary Whitehouse, who received her champagne with thanks.

He gave up the show after a decade, but later took it to Talksport as Champagne and Roses. From 1988 to 1991 he had a Saturday-afternoon show on Radio 2, although BBC budgets prevented him from sending out more than two or three bottles of champagne per programme. “Some people ask me why I don’t give away something worthy but champagne is useless, it’s ridiculous, it’s fun and has a certain style, and I quite like a certain style.”

On stage he was a consummate and versatile player of light comedy or lounge-hall thrillers. His polished technique enabled him to switch from melodrama (The Royal Baccarat Scandal, 1988; The Corsican Brothers, 1974) to farce (The Little Hut, 1974; Boeing-Boeing, 1965) or detective drama (Suddenly at Home, 1977; and as Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle pastiche The Crucifer of Blood, 1979).

He was not as light-minded as his most famous roles might suggest. Behind the bland exterior of gentlemanly ease and imperturbable integrity, there lurked a shifty streak in Harper’s characterisations. This erupted forcibly in his Iago to Paul Rogers’s Othello (Bristol Old Vic, 1974).

He was also a thoughtful broadcaster, and although he listed as his favourite recreations “eating, riding and reading other people’s letters”, he did take the trouble to compile and perform a one-man show with himself as Rudyard Kipling, expounding the no-longer fashionable author’s writings, which he toured in Cornwall, took to Plymouth and brought to London for a season in 1984.

His dramatic forte, however, remained the unruffled rascal, the sly lover, the smooth adulterer and the reckless seducer. He could light a pretty lady’s cigarette with enough tenderness, grace and unfulfilled promise to draw a sigh of envy from any matinee audience.

The son of Ernest Harper, a London stockbroker, and his wife Mary, née Thomas, Gerald George Frederick Harper was born on February 15 1929. He claimed he knew what he wanted to do from the moment he landed the role of a pompous policeman in a play called The Magic Holly Bush at an Essex school at the age of seven.

His father wanted him to become a doctor, however, and sent him away to board at Haileybury in Hertfordshire. Although he “hated it”, he admitted he was grateful for the public-school accent which helped him throughout his career.

After serving in the Royal Artillery as a second lieutenant for his National Service, he got a place at Rada. “A lot of people were lucky I didn’t become a doctor,” he observed. “I did far less harm as an actor.”

At Liverpool rep he cultivated his distinctive languor, even when he played “old men with cotton wool in their ears”, he said. He had his West End break in the farce Charley’s Aunt opposite Frankie Howerd (Globe, 1955) and in Julian Slade’s musical comedy Free as Air (Savoy, 1957).

After a brief stint in the classics – as Hippolytus’s tutor Theramenes in Racine’s Phèdre, with Margaret Rawlings in the title role; and as Sebastian in Michael Benthall’s Old Vic Twelfth Night, which toured the US in 1958-59 – he returned to earth in the West End as Dickinson opposite Alec Guinness in the title role in Terence Rattigan’s Ross (Haymarket, 1960).

By then, however, his confidence of making it in the business had begun to “sag”. A book called Management by Objective, on how to manage companies by setting firm targets, proved the catalyst he needed. “I made my particular objective: ‘Get into television – and fast.’”

Changing his agent, within a week he had landed his first television part, albeit a small one, in an ITV play. His TV break was the spy series The Sleeper (1964), and Adam Adamant Lives! and Hadleigh followed, each making him a bigger star.

He enjoyed returning occasionally to the stage, but typically, as in the 1981 Francis Durbridge thriller House Guest, it was to play more suave aristocrats.

His film appearances included The Admirable Crichton, A Night to Remember, The Dam Busters, Tunes of Glory, The Young Ones and the 1979 The Lady Vanishes.

Without perhaps the pedigree, his real life was not so far removed from that of his acting image. He loved foxhunting, golf and tennis, high-class hotels and good restaurants. He said he “tried never to let a day go by without drinking champagne”. At the turn of the millennium he hit the headlines after embarking on a relationship with the comedy actress Sarah Alexander, some 40 years his junior.

In 2008 he came out of retirement in Spain to tour the UK as Mr Justice Wargrave in Bill Kenwright’s production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

His first marriage, to the actress Jane Downs, lasted 18 years and was dissolved in 1976. He divorced his second wife, Carla Rabaiotti, a former Pan American air stewardess, in 1983. He is survived by a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second.

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