Jamie Farr

Nearly twenty years of one-scene parts came before the dress. Jamie Farr, born Jameel Joseph Farah in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934, turned up in Blackboard Jungle in 1955 as a pupil named Santini, and then spent the next decade and a half being cast for his surname: Pedro Ortega in a 1956 western, an unnamed delivery boy on The Dick Van Dyke Show, John-Chee on Hondo, Yasser Hafiz in The Blue Knight. Steady work of the least dignified kind, the ethnic-utility slot that American television handed out by the yard.

M*A*S*H changed the arithmetic. As Corporal Maxwell Klinger, the soldier trying to get discharged by wearing dresses, he had a gimmick that could have lasted six episodes and instead lasted years, largely because Farr played the man underneath it as entirely sane. The joke only works if Klinger is the most reasonable person in the tent, and he is. He carried the character over into AfterMASH in 1983.

Afterwards he was famous the way a long-running sitcom makes you famous, which is to say instantly recognisable and permanently typed. He was the Sheik in both Cannonball Run films, Jacob Marley in Scrooged, a version of himself in Men Behaving Badly, and a fixture on game shows and Battle of the Network Stars. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985 and was still taking parts in his eighties, on Bella and the Bulldogs and The Cool Kids.