TheatreObituaryDerek Benfield
Derek Benfield, who has died aged 82, successfully combined the career of a character actor with that of a prolific boulevard playwright. Most familiar from appearances on television in The Brothers (1972-76) and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (1996-98), the diminutive, balding and often moustachioed Benfield frequently played fathers and members of what used to be called "the lower orders".
Benfield was born in Bradford, where his father was a journalist. Many of his later roles brought out his northern background, as did his plays, such as Down to Brass Tacks (1962). After studying at Bingley grammar school, he did some early performing on forces radio during wartime service in the army, before acting training at Rada.
Starting with The Young in Heart (1953), Benfield wrote more than 30 stage plays. Most were light comedies, often trading on marital misunderstandings, with occasional diversions such as Murder for the Asking (1966). Such titles as Post Horn Gallop (1964), A Bird in the Hand (1973) and Touch and Go (1982) clearly showed the influence of Brian Rix, in whose company Benfield had made his acting debut, in Yorkshire in 1948. They were popular in regional venues and with amateur dramatic companies, and were often performed abroad. Beyond a Joke (1979), starring Arthur Lowe, had its premiere at the Shanklin Theatre on the Isle of Wight. Bedside Manners, starring John Inman, had a tour in 1988, and Benfield was still having productions staged in the new millennium.
After Rix, Benfield worked with various repertory companies. By 1953 he was in Preston, where he married his wife Susan, another member of the company, and two years later came his first appearance on television, in Return to the Lost Planet. However, in the early 1960s, the new medium seemed to have suddenly realised that the north existed, and Benfield benefited from this, with Granada's anthologies The Villains (1964) and The Gamblers (1967), a brief Coronation Street stint in 1967, and, for BBC2, The Siege of Manchester (1965). Benfield appeared in 12 episodes of Z Cars, and wrote one two-part story in 1968, about a missing schoolgirl. In that, the mother was played by Iris Russell, who played Benfield's wife in Timeslip (ATV, 1970-71), a children's sci-fi series that is barely remembered by the public, but still retains loyal fans.
The Brothers, centring on the Hammond family's road haulage firm, was in retrospect more of a soap than a drama series; Benfield was a regular, as their foreman, and it was highly successful, as well as a surprise hit in Sweden and Israel. It was one of the many Sunday night successes of the producer Gerard Glaister, for whom Benfield featured in The Long Chase (BBC, 1972), a children's thriller.
Benfield's occasional role in Rumpole of the Bailey, between 1978 and 1980, was as Albert Handyside, who had the distinction of having been Rumpole's clerk at the time of the Penge Bungalow Murders. Crossing from Yorkshire to Lancashire, he partnered Patricia Routledge in four BBC series, as the amateur sleuth Hetty Wainthropp's long-suffering husband Robert.
He once said, "My family are delighted with my success as a playwright, as it helps to prop up my tottering career as an actor." He is survived by Susan, his daughter Kate, a casting director, son Jamie and two grandchildren.
Derek Benfield, actor and writer, born 11 March 1926; died 10 March 2009
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