George Sewell

George Sewell, actor: born London 31 August 1924; married (one daughter); died London 2 April 2007.

A London East End background and rugged, "lived in" looks brought George Sewell to acting late, at the age of 35, but he was soon part of a movement that revolutionised stage and television drama.

While drinking in a pub one day, Sewell was introduced by his younger brother Danny, an actor, to Dudley Sutton, a member of the director Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, which was establishing itself as an important outlet for working-class and left-of-centre voices. Sutton told Sewell that Littlewood was looking for someone with his looks - a face like a criminal - to appear in her new production. "I thought Dudley was joking and I pointed out that I wasn't an actor anyway," Sewell said.

Dudley seemed to think that this would be an advantage, because he told me: "So much the better - Joan doesn't like using actors." And he challenged me to go along and see her.

The result was that Sewell landed a small role in Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1959), a Cockney comedy written by Frank Norman, with songs by Lionel Bart, and featuring an array of gamblers, builders, spivs, prostitutes, Teddy boys and girls, and corrupt police. It was so successful that it transferred to the West End (Garrick Theatre, 1960) and Sewell can be heard singing a duet with Barbara Windsor on the original-cast album.

The newly launched actor was subsequently cast by Littlewood as the bus driver Bert (living with Barbara Windsor's Maggie) in another Cockney comedy, Sparrers Can't Sing (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1960), and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in the satirical revue Oh What a Lovely War! (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1963, and Wyndham's Theatre, 1963), which the company then performed on Broadway (Broadhurst Theatre, 1964-65), with Sewell also taking the role of the Kaiser.

At the same time, the actor's Theatre Workshop background made him ideal for a director who was rolling back the boundaries of television drama. With the BBC's newly launched "Wednesday Play", Ken Loach was seeking to follow in the Littlewood tradition of presenting working-class voices and to combine that on screen with the "gritty realism" of the French New Wave cinema. Sewell became one of his small group of unofficial repertory players, acting in Three Clear Sundays (1965) and The Coming Out Party (1965) - both written by James O'Connor, who had served 10 years in prison before gaining a reprieve - as well as taking the role of Barney, the tallyman, in Up the Junction (1965), which caused a furore for its depiction of uninhibited factory women. He also had a small role in Loach's first feature film, Poor Cow (1967).

The actor was immediately sympathetic to the director's ambitions. "His way of working was comparable to Joan's and he would often allow us to improvise scenes," Sewell said.

Just before working with Ken, I had been in a rehearsal room with another director. While doing a scene talking across a table, he said: "Don't lean too far forward over the table. Camera 4 will never get you there." Ken would never have done that. He made sure the camera got what you were doing.

A long and successful screen career followed for Sewell, whose face was best known to television viewers in another groundbreaking drama, Special Branch. It had already run for two years (1969-70) when he joined it as Detective Chief Inspector Alan Craven for its third and fourth series (1973-74). Sewell and Patrick Mower (as Detective Chief Inspector Haggerty) replaced the original stars, Derren Nesbitt, Wensley Pithey and Fulton Mackay, as the men at the top of the clandestine police department safeguarding national security.

The gritty ITV drama - shot, on its relaunch, on film instead of video, in real-life, unglamorous locations - attracted up to 20 million viewers and was a forerunner to other hard-hitting series such as The Sweeney, with Sewell's character seen trying to maintain a degree of morality while tackling high-level, sometimes seedy criminal activity.

Born in 1924 in Hoxton, east London, where his mother came from a family of florists, Sewell left school at 14 to follow his father into the printing trade as an apprentice but, on the outbreak of the Second World War, switched to work repairing bomb damage. In 1943, he signed up for the RAF, but his training as a pilot had not been completed by the time the war ended.

On being demobbed, he worked as a street photographer, bricklayer, window-cleaner, carpenter, assistant road manager and drummer in a rumba band before, in 1948, joining the Merchant Navy as a steward for the Cunard Line. Sewell followed this with six years travelling Europe as a coach courier for a holiday tours company.

After joining Theatre Workshop, his second play with the company was transformed into the feature film Sparrows Can't Sing (1963), with Sewell recreating the role of Bert, and he found himself in demand on screen. His early films included This Sporting Life (directed by Lindsay Anderson, based on David Storey's novel, 1963), the Ken Annakin-directed crime drama The Informers (1963) and the comedy Kaleidoscope (alongside Warren Beatty and Susannah York, 1966).

But it was television in which Sewell became increasingly popular. Among a multitude of characters, policemen became his stock-in-trade, beginning with the role of Detective Inspector Brogan in Z Cars (1967) and including that of the retired Special Branch officer Mendel, George Smiley's minder, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979). He also played the garage owner and former villain Sammy Carson in various episodes (1970-71) of the crime drama Paul Temple, Colonel Alec Freeman in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's live- action sci-fi series UFO (1970-73), and the Fascist Ratcliffe in the four-part Doctor Who story "Remembrance of the Daleks" (marking the programme's 25th anniversary, 1988).

Away from drama and science fiction, Sewell was one of the writer- director Eric Sykes's cohorts in the feature-length "comedy-thriller" If You Go Down in the Woods Today (1981) and took guest roles in various popular sitcoms, as well as starring as Robert Palmer, the electronics millionaire chauffeured by Jim London (the stand-up comedian Jim Davidson), in all four series of Home James! (1987-90).

Then, he teamed up with the "dumb and dumber" sleuths played by Jasper Carrott and Robert Powell in sketches for the Canned Carrott series (1990) that were spun off into the sitcom The Detectives (1993-97), sending up his own Special Branch character in the guise of the pair's deadpan boss, Superintendent Cottam.

Sewell's other films included the gangster drama Get Carter (alongside Michael Caine, 1971) and Barry Lyndon (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1975). The actor once declared himself to have no preference between films, television and stage work, saying: "I would sooner be in good television than a bad play. I'd sooner be in a certain film with a very good director. I like being in musicals."

Anthony Hayward