Patrick Macnee

Patrick Macnee was in films long before he had any business being in them, drifting through Pygmalion in 1938 and Hamlet a decade later as an uncredited extra, then working the live-television era on Kraft Television Theatre, Sunday Night Theatre and Matinee Theater, with a young Jacob Marley in the 1951 Scrooge along the way. Born in Paddington in 1922, he was twenty years into a jobbing actor's life before the part arrived that made him.

That part was John Steed. He joined The Avengers in 1961 as assistant to Ian Hendry's Dr David Keel, inherited the lead when Hendry left after the first series, then carried the show through a succession of female partners until 1969 and returned to it for The New Avengers in 1976. Steed is a genuinely strange invention: a British intelligence officer played as a dandy, bowler hat and umbrella, absurdly courteous, using good manners the way other agents used a pistol. Macnee performed him without a wink, which is precisely why the joke lasted.

Everything afterwards traded on that. He became the establishment figure who could be punctured: Sir Denis Eton-Hogg in This Is Spinal Tap, Sir Wilfred in Waxwork and its sequel, Tibbett alongside Roger Moore in A View to a Kill, Dr George Waggner in The Howling. He was Watson in a television Sherlock Holmes, the Imperious Leader's voice in Battlestar Galactica, and, in a joke worth the whole enterprise, the voice of an invisible man in the 1998 film of The Avengers. He died in 2015.