Barry Morse

Barry Morse's most famous role was a pursuer. As Lieutenant Philip Gerard in The Fugitive, from 1963 to 1967, he was the obstacle, the man who would not stop, and the whole series depended on his being credible rather than villainous. Born in London in 1918, he was British by origin and Canadian by career, and the second half of that describes a filmography that looks scattered until you notice how much of it was Canadian.

Genre television took him next. He played Victor Bergman through the first year of Space: 1999, the scientist whose job was to explain the impossible with a straight face, and Shaliff in the Canadian series The Starlost. He appeared in The Ray Bradbury Theater and, later, in La Femme Nikita and Waking the Dead. Horror used him well too: Asylum, and The Changeling as the parapsychologist, the role that exists to make the supernatural sound like a procedure.

The prestige work came in miniseries. He turned up in both halves of the same sprawling 1980s war epic, as Wolf Stoller in The Winds of War and Franz Halder in War and Remembrance, and as the Marquis St. Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities, the credit closest to the stage career running underneath all of it. He was still taking parts in British series into his eighties, and he died in 2008.