Cyril Shaps

Character actor and voice-over artist

Cyril Leonard Shaps, actor: born London 13 October 1923; married 1950 Anita Rosen (died 2002; two sons, one daughter); died Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex 1 January 2003.

In a career spent playing character roles in scores of television programmes and feature films, Cyril Shaps was probably most at home as Rabbi Levy in the sitcom Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Width (1967-71).

Levy and the Catholic Father Ryan (Eamon Kelly) were local priests caught in the crossfire between Manny Cohen and Patrick Kelly, the Jewish jacketmaker and Irish trousermaker who teamed up to run a London East End tailor's business in the series created by Vince Powell and Harry Driver.

The trade and location were familiar to Shaps, who was born in the East End in 1923, the son of a Polish-born Jewish tailor. Although keen to act, he spent five years as a clerk with the London County Council Ambulance Service and taught drama and music appreciation in the Army Education Corps, before winning a scholarship to Rada in 1947.

Shaps worked as a producer and presenter for the English-language station Radio Nederland in Holland for two years, before returning to Britain, making his stage début in Guildford and acting with the BBC radio repertory company. He made his first screen appearances as Bibot in the popular ITV swashbuckling series The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1955).

In addition to character roles in programmes such as Danger Man (1960, 1961) and The Saint (1966), he played the Wigmaker, alongside Lee Montague as the bandit Tajomaru and Robert Hardy as the Husband, in a BBC production of Rashomon (1961). Shaps was also seen intermittently as Mr Hennessey, father of Beryl (Polly James), in the sitcom The Liver Birds (1971-72).

The 19th-century shipping saga The Onedin Line (1971, 1973) starred Peter Gilmore as James Onedin, a Liverpool ship's master who launched his own line in 1860 with a contract with a Portuguese wine tycoon, Señor Braganza (played by Shaps), gained in a battle with his former employer, Callon (Edward Chapman).

Such foreign roles became as much Shaps's stock-in-trade as Jewish characters, who included Grandad Wax in Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976), Jack Rosenthal's Play for Today. He was also in demand as a voice-over artist. He took over from George Murcell as the Austrian inventor Professor Popkiss, the arch-enemy Masterspy and other characters in the early Gerry Anderson puppet science-fantasy series Supercar (1962), and was one of the voices of Mr Kipling in the "exceedingly good cakes" commercials.

One of his earliest film roles was as a bartender at the officers' club in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and his subsequent pictures included To Sir, With Love (1966), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) and Roman Polanski's new Holocaust drama, The Pianist (2002).

In The Madness of King George (1994), he played Sir Lucas Pepys, one of the king's doctors (who "found the stool more eloquent than the pulse"), reviving the stage role he took at the National Theatre in The Madness of George III (1992-94).

Anthony Hayward