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The actor Tom Chadbon, who has died aged 80, was a deft character player, blessed with a versatile voice – his naturally light, delicate, melodious vocal register acquired steel and depth when required – and an almost cherubic physiognomy that could toughen on command. He became well known to television viewers in 1977 as Derek Paynton, the boyfriend, then husband, of Sandra (played by Nerys Hughes) in the long-running Carla Lane sitcom The Liver Birds (1969-79) and between 2008 and 2011 enjoyed a recurring stint on the BBC series Casualty as the hospital’s director of clinical care, Henry Williams.
He will also be remembered as the inept but dogged detective Duggan in the 1979 Doctor Who story City of Death, helping (and sometimes hindering) Tom Baker’s attempts to thwart an alien scheme to steal the Mona Lisa. A comically imaginative caper, filmed partly on location in Paris and co-written by Douglas Adams, City of Death is a high-water mark for Doctor Who and remains the series’ most watched story: the final episode notched up an impressive 16 million viewers. In a perfectly judged performance, Chadbon was both doughty sidekick and comic foil – playing Duggan dead straight (bar the odd well-timed double take when needed) and being hilarious as a consequence.
He was born in Luton, Bedfordshire, the elder son of Josie (nee Cook) and her husband, Thomas, a bank manager. The family moved to Jersey when Tom was 12 and he attended Victoria college in St Helier and then Chichester high school for boys. At his father’s behest he became a trainee at a solicitor’s firm, but found the work tedious – and with help and encouragement from the actor Pearl Goodman he got a job as a stage hand at the Chichester Festival theatre. He subsequently enrolled at the Webber Douglas drama school in London, before moving to Rada after one term.
On graduation, he joined the company at the Phoenix theatre, Leicester, before working with the English Stage Company, playing Valentine in Twelfth Night at the Royal Court in London. He remained there for its 1969 Edward Bond season – featuring Saved, Early Morning, and Narrow Road to the Deep North – which became an international and European tour, helping to cement Bond’s reputation abroad.
After his television debut in an episode of The Jazz Age (1968), he became a regular fixture on screen, equally at home in drama and comedy. He was one of the leads in the legal drama Crown Prosecutor (1995), drawing on his legal training as the impatient but skilled maverick Lenny Monk, recurred as Dr Kenworthy in the cosy drama Where the Heart Is (2001-06) and played the regular role of the senior officer presiding over cases investigated by the behavioural analyst Tony Hill (Robson Green) in Wire in the Blood (2002-03), based on the books by Val McDermid. He was, though, mostly in demand as a valuable guest star in dozens of series, from Special Branch (1969) to Agatha Raison (2016) via Rumpole of the Bailey (1978), Tales of the Unexpected (1983), Peep Show (2008) and Poirot (2013).
His ability to ground the fantastical made him especially useful to the popular genres of science-fiction and fantasy. His lead role in an episode of Out of the Unknown (1971) found him on intense form as the leader of a gang of hypnotically controlled elite soldiers, while in Nigel Kneale’s classic The Stone Tape (1972), he was one of a rambunctious team of scientists whose nerves begin to fray as they investigate a haunting. His terrified scream of realisation that the ghost has infested their own computer is a much cited example of abject on-screen terror. His other genre credits included good parts in Blake’s 7 (1979), a second Doctor Who adventure (this time opposite Colin Baker, 1986), and Space Precinct (1995). His last screen role was a cameo in the hit fantasy series Game of Thrones (2017). His popularity was such that he returned to Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 in several audio spin-offs in recent years.
On the big screen he made memorable contributions to The Beast Must Die (1974), Tess (1979), Roman Polanski’s film of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Dance with a Stranger (1985, with Miranda Richardson as Ruth Ellis) and he appeared briefly in the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006).
Although he eventually retired from theatre to concentrate on screen and voiceover work, Chadbon managed to indulge his passion for Shakespeare before he did so. His favourite role was Leontes in A Winter’s Tale for the Bristol Old Vic (1983) and his last was King Duncan in Macbeth, with Lennie James and Helen McCrory at the Tricycle theatre (1995). He was also filmed performing Hamlet’s To Be or Not To Be speech for the Open University in 1971.
He was a highly skilled and experienced voiceover artist, in demand for commercials and corporate work, latterly narrating the documentary Katie Price: In Therapy (2015) for Channel 5. His wicked sense of humour stood him in good stead throughout his career – he had a reputation for being fun to work with and was a self-confessed giggler.
His 1966 marriage to Deborah Leathers ended in divorce. In 1977 he married the designer Jane Hennessy, who survives him, as do their daughters, Millie and Felicity, his sons, Dominic and Nicholas, from his first marriage, and four grandchildren, Delphina, Pearl, Sasha and Fynn.
