My father John Line’s acting career went from “hired rough” in a TV movie in 1957 to “God” in the 2009 feature film My Last Five Girlfriends. In between he made hundreds of television appearances. He had a face that everyone recognised but a name few remembered. He was exceptionally modest, and when strangers approached, convinced they knew him, he felt he could not let them down, and invariably left it to our mother to explain.
John, who has died aged 87, appeared at the Royal Court and in the West End in the 1950s, when Theatre of the Absurd was at its height, alongside Laurence Olivier in plays by Ionesco and NF Simpson, and in late works by TS Eliot, Michael Codron comedies and revue with Kenneth Williams and Maggie Smith. In 1962 he was cast as the heartthrob Dr Andrew Shaw in Emergency Ward 10, a television series that shot him to public recognition.
John came from a family of medics, and it sometimes seemed he could not escape that background, playing doctors more often than any other role. He was born in Birmingham, where his father, Arthur, was a GP, with his mother, Margaret, running the dispensary. After Sibford and Bromsgrove schools and Handsworth grammar, John did his national service in the Royal Medical Corps, and later he gained an Open University qualification in psychology. He was quite at home on Emergency Ward 10.
He was rarely off the screen after that: Oil Strike North, Warship, Wings, Howards’ Way, The Onedin Line, To Serve Them All My Days, Secret Army, Colditz. He was a poet in Survivors and a jumpsuited hero in Doctor Who – and appeared on stage in Curse of the Daleks, a play by Terry Nation at the Wyndham’s theatre. He was in the 1984 films Another Country and Breakout, and in nearly all the soaps as a regular, in many cases for years at a time.
He was at his best in children’s drama: Castors Away! (1967), Tom’s Midnight Garden (1968) and as a Viking chieftain in the Raven and the Cross – a 1971 series in which, aged 12, I also had a small part. He suffered from back pain, and I remember watching him squeeze into a steel corset under his tunic and grit his teeth before being hoisted on to a horse to engage in ferocious battle on the South Downs.
He was not interested in money or possessions, except for a red Morris post office van in which he would drive to Guildford, Surrey, where latterly he taught at the drama school, with a mattress in the back so he had somewhere to sleep if he ran out of petrol – which was often. When it got battered, he would buy a pot of red gloss paint and repaint it. If there was any left over he would paint his front door red too.
A master of understatement who sought passionately for emotional truth in every part, he was circumspect about what others expected an actor to be, and endlessly amused rather than seduced by the world he inhabited.
He is survived by his wife, Jill (nee Rowland), whom he met when they were both in rep in Shrewsbury, and married in 1957, and three sons, Kit, Jason and me.
