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Glyn Houston, Welsh actor who enjoyed a long career in scores of films and television shows – obituary
Glyn Houston, who has died aged 93, was the last member of the group of Welsh actors, among them Richard Burton, Stanley Baker and his own brother Donald Houston, who made their names on stage and screen in the decade after the Second World War.
While never quite enjoying star billing, Glyn Houston had the longest career of them all. He appeared in some 80 films across half a century, usually in minor roles, and as a familiar face, often an authority figure, in dozens of television programmes ranging from Dixon of Dock Green to the 1980s sitcom Keep It in the Family.
Inspired by his brother, who had been spotted at 16 in a local production while working at a colliery and who, in 1949, would shoot to fame opposite Jean Simmons in The Blue Lagoon, Glyn Houston took his first steps in showbusiness in late 1945. Then aged 20 and serving with the Royal Signals in Singapore, he was tasked with organising a welcome for the comedian Tommy Trinder when he arrived to entertain the troops.
The success of this led to Houston, who had comic ambitions himself, creating a show entitled Flags are Flying which subsequently toured India. Among those involved with the concert party was the young Jimmy Perry, the future co-writer of Dad’s Army. The troupe’s experiences later became the basis for another of Perry’s shows, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, with Windsor Davies and Melvyn Hayes.
After returning to Britain, Houston auditioned unsuccessfully for a spot telling jokes at the Windmill Theatre in Soho. His brother was starting to land parts, however, and began to put work his way, initially as an assistant stage manager at the theatre in Guildford.
A chance meeting with a casting director then led to his first cinema role, as a barrow boy in the police drama The Blue Lamp (1950), with Jack Warner and Dirk Bogarde.
Over the next decade, Houston appeared in dozens of similar small parts in films such as The Cruel Sea, The Sea Shall Not Have Them, A Night to Remember and Sink the Bismarck! On dry land, he played Joan Collins’s boyfriend in one of her first films, Turn the Key Softly (1953).
He relaxed in the company of his fellow Welshmen, and later of Elizabeth Taylor, although he gave up drinking earlier than most of them did. Houston had to see many of his friends become stars, and later regretted not taking on Shakespearean roles he had been offered which, though not well paid, might have demonstrated his range.
In the early 1960s he had a run of four films as Norman Wisdom’s foil, beginning with A Stitch in Time, but commitments such as this led to his turning down a part that Baker offered him in Zulu.
Yet the advent of television, and in particular of commercial television, offered new opportunities for younger actors. It had programmes to broadcast but established stars were reluctant to take the risk of appearing on what was regarded as an upstart medium. Houston profited from this, featuring in such staples of the era as episodes of The Saint and Danger Man.
Bigger parts followed, opposite Rachel Thomas in the BBC version of How Green Was My Valley (1968) and as a news editor in the series Deadline Midnight. In the 1970s he played Bunter, valet to Ian Carmichael’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and went on to be seen in the likes of Crown Court, Doctor Who, Minder, Shoestring, Softly, Softly and Inspector Morse.
The second of three children, Glyndwr Donald Houston was born on October 23 1925 in Tonypandy, Glamorgan. He grew up in the Rhondda, where his maternal grandmother – “Jones the Milk” – had a milk round with which he would help out.
When he was still a young boy, however, the Depression forced his parents to move to London in search of work, together with Donald. Glyn was left behind in the care of his extended family. It was not for three years that he saw his mother Elsie, who by then was suffering from the heart problem of which she would die at 29.
Unable to cope, his father Alex, a former professional footballer with Dundee and Portsmouth, abandoned the family and later settled in Manchester, where he worked as a lift operator in a department store.
Glyn was educated at Llwynypia Elementary School and by regular visits to the local library. At 11, he survived peritonitis after suffering a burst appendix. He joined up in 1943, serving initially as a gunner with the Fleet Air Arm.
Later roles in the cinema included that as a Mexican ne’er-do-well in the feature film of Are You Being Served? (1977), with his brother in The Sea Wolves, and as Anthony Hopkins’s father in Heartland (1989), set on a Welsh farm. He also appeared in Hopkins’s stage production of Under Milk Wood, voiced commercials for British Airways, and played the detective Brother Cadfael on Radio Four.
Given a lifetime award by Bafta Cymru in 1988, he retired at 88 after playing the poet Dannie Abse for a radio drama-documentary. Golf and bridge were his chief enthusiasms, and in 2009 he published a memoir, A Black and White Actor.
He married, in 1956, Shirley Lawrence, an actress who had played “Just” William Brown’s sister Ethel on television. She predeceased him and he is survived by their two daughters.
Glyn Houston, born October 23 1925, died June 30 2019