Hywel Bennett, actor best known as Shelley – obituary

Bennett made a string of films – usually risqué comedies and now mostly forgotten – through the late 1960s and early 1970s, among them the Boulting Brothers’ tender drama, The Family Way. For a time it looked as though he might become a star, like his fellow Welshman Richard Burton, with whom he was compared.

He became a “face” of the period, bought a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud and in 1970 was mobbed by paparazzi at his marriage in Streatham to Cathy McGowan, the mini-skirted presenter of the television show Ready Steady Go!

Yet despite his obvious talent, his film career petered out. “I had come in at the tail end of everything, the studio system and so on,” he remembered in 1986. “Although I was under contract to British Lion, it was really too late. If I’d joined them five years earlier I would probably have made 40 films.

You would just make one and move straight on to the next – that’s what happened to Peter Sellers and Richard Attenborough. But around 1971 I found that I had been led up a road and then somebody had put a brick wall in front of me. The film industry had just vanished.”

But Bennett’s low-key persona proved equally well suited to theatre and particularly television. Shelley was a literate sitcom that unexpectedly struck a chord with audiences, running for 10 series on ITV from 1979-84 and 1988-92, with a following of 18 million in its heyday.

The writers, Peter Tilbury and later Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin among others, devised a formula that endured. “They had created what was almost a monologue,” said Bennett, “and turned it into a popular sit-com. It got more and more like Hancock as time went on.”

Bennett’s character, James Shelley, was a bright underachiever armed with a PhD and a sardonic wit who drifted between the labour exchange, the flat he rented with wife Frances (Belinda Sinclair), and brief stints in employment. The series was aptly pitched for the era of Thatcherism.

Bennett himself worked hard and drank hard. He underwent several treatments for alcoholism, seeking advice from fellow sufferer Anthony Hopkins. To make matters worse he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, which may have accounted for the bulging eyes that became more pronounced as he got older.

Hywel  Thomas Bennett was born on a farm at Garnant in the Black Mountains on April 8 1944, the son of Gorden Bennett and his wife Sarah Gwen (née Lewis). He spoke Welsh until he was five, when the family moved to London where his father was a policeman. After that Hywel spoke English with a slight Cockney accent. He was educated at the Henry Thornton Grammar School in Clapham and then at Rada. His younger brother Alun also became an actor.

As a teenager he was keen on running and athletics and belonged to a club in Tooting, but he gave it up to join the National Youth Theatre. The NYT’s founder, Michael Croft, influenced Hywel profoundly, encouraging him always to pay close attention to the text, particularly Shakespeare.

Aged 15, Bennett played Ophelia in a touring production of Hamlet for the NYT, which also featured Simon Ward as Guildenstern. The show was taken to Paris, where a critic wrote that Bennett’s was “the broadest-shouldered Ophelia I ever saw”.

After leaving Rada Bennett experienced virtually instant success. His debut in an Alan Plater play, A Smashing Day, at the New Arts was well-received; the BBC spotted him and he was cast first in an episode of Doctor Who (1965) and then in television plays, among them A Month in the Country (1966); Romeo and Juliet (1967), in which he played Romeo as an unstable adolescent; and Simon Gray’s Death of a Teddy Bear (1967), based on the Rattenbury murder case of the 1930s.

Bennett was only 22 and still sharing a room with his younger brother at the family home in Streatham when he landed the starring role in his first and also his best film, The Family Way.

Directed by Roy Boulting and scripted by Bill Naughton (who had just written Alfie), the film concerns the trials of young Arthur Fitton – insecure, diffident but with a steely core – who is newly married to Hayley Mills (John Mills played her father), but rendered impotent by the oppressive strain of having to live under one roof with the in-laws in their cramped terrace in Rochdale.

Two years later Bennett again collaborated with Hayley Mills and Boulting, this time as a psychopath with a mother fixation, on Twisted Nerve, an unpleasant psychological horror film which upset mental health advocates.

A burst of films followed, notably The Virgin Soldiers (1969), based on the Leslie Thomas bestseller, in which Bennett played the sexually diffident Private Briggs; Loot (1970), a misfiring adaptation of Joe Orton’s play; Ralph Thomas’s sniggering Percy (1971), about the hilarity that ensues after a man receives transplanted sexual organs; and Endless Night (1972), from an Agatha Christie novel.

Having failed to crack the American market – “I hated the place,” he said later – and with the British film industry suddenly in steep decline, Bennett found himself by 1973 with “nowhere to go”. So he returned to his natural home, television and the theatre, where he was constantly in demand for the next decade and a half.

Critics praised his performances in West End productions such as Otherwise Engaged by Simon Gray (1977) and Peter Shaffer’s The Case of the Oily Levantine (1979); and, at the National, in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer as Marlow (1984).

He became a stalwart of upmarket BBC drama productions, usually inhabiting roles on the weirder end of the spectrum – among them Tom the pimp in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven (1978); Ricki Tarr, the paranoid and unstable “scalp-hunter” in the masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979); and creepy Dr Edmund Bickleigh in Malice Aforethought the same year.

He was also brilliant as a hard-bitten newspaper hack in Frankie and Johnnie (1986), a paranoid thriller with a chemical weapons theme for BBC Two, directed by Martin Campbell, who was known for Edge of Darkness. The critic Bryan Appleyard hailed it as “the first realistic portrayal of a journalist yet seen on television”.

But by the time the character of Shelley was resuscitated for The Return of Shelley in 1988 it had begun to outstay its welcome. Lewis Jones in The Sunday Telegraph regretted that “as [Shelley’s] appearance grows more interesting his speech grows sadly less so” and his “gimcrack blokey philosophy” was “becoming rather a bore”.

As Bennett hit later middle age his television appearances became infrequent and what roles he was offered were seamier. He turned up in EastEnders (2003) as the cigar-chewing gangster Jack Dalton, and brutish coppers seemed to suit him too – such as, in 1996, DS Spader in Frontiers for ITV and Detective Superintendent Harpur in Harpur and Iles (BBC One).

Bennett had first appeared in a Dennis Potter television play in 1966 – Where the Buffalo Roam – and in one of Potter’s last, Karaoke, 30 years later, he played a dangerously unhinged karaoke bar owner. His last great film performance was in One for the Road (2004), a cautionary tale about three alcoholics waiting to face the music for an unspecified but ghastly crime.

Hywel Bennett’s later years were spent living in an old cottage near the sea at Deal in Kent. He was at one time barred from two of the town’s pubs. Neighbours complained of being woken in the night by the actor ringing the 17th-century bell attached to his house and shouting: “There’s a storm a-coming.”

Like many male actors from a Celtic background, Bennett was not entirely comfortable with acting as an occupation. He disliked actors’ pretentiousness and, especially in his younger days, returned to Wales as often as possible to drink with miners. “It’s dead, all this darling bit,” he once remarked. “It makes me sick, it’s so phoney and insincere. I do it myself actually, but it still makes me ill.”

His first marriage was dissolved in 1988 and in 1998 he married Sandra Layne Fulford, who survives him with a daughter from the first marriage.

Hywel Bennett, born April 8 1944, died July 25 2017