Jack Hedley

Jack Hedley was born Jack Hawkins in London in 1930 and had to change his name before he could work, because there was already a Jack Hawkins on Equity's books and he was a star. The substitution neatly summarises the career that followed: a superb British character lead who spent forty years being the most reliable person in the cast rather than the most famous.

Television is where he made his name. He became a household presence through the BBC serial The World of Tim Frazer at the start of the 1960s, and the pattern held for decades: Lt. Col. John Preston in Colditz, guest leads across ITV's anthology strands, Adam Frost in Journey to the Unknown, a German general in 'Allo 'Allo!, and, late on, an alien in the puppet-and-prosthetics oddity Space Precinct.

His film work is a strange and enjoyable spread. He is an uncredited reporter in Lawrence of Arabia and William Baxter in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. He is Sir Timothy Havelock in For Your Eyes Only, the marine archaeologist whose predicament starts the Bond plot moving. And then, because European film financing in the early eighties made odd matches, he is the lead detective in Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper, a giallo notorious enough that it spent decades being cut, banned and argued over. Hedley plays it entirely straight, which is exactly why it works. He died in 2021.