Veteran Character Actor Hugh Walters, 1939-2015

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The veteran actor Hugh Walters, who made three guest appearances in Doctor Who, has died at the age of 75.

His Doctor Who roles formed just a small part of a lengthy acting career which made him a familiar face on TV screens over several decades. Walters’ first appearance in the programme came in the 1965 Dalek story The Chase when he had the small but not insignificant task of portraying William Shakespeare in the scene where the Doctor shows off his Time and Space Visualiser, thus earning himself a place in all those ‘real historical characters the Doctor has met’ articles over the years.

A more substantial role came his way in The Deadly Assassin in 1976 as Commentator Runcible, a fellow-former classmate of the Doctor whose snide personality was nicely captured by Walters. Robert Holmes classic script allowed the story’s guest cast rather more room to develop on-screen than usual given the absence of a regular companion although Runcible would meet a sticky end, murdered for getting too close to the truth of the Lord President’s assassination.

His final role in Doctor Who was in 1985’s Revelation of the Daleks, perhaps the best Sixth Doctor story, when he played Vogel, ever-loyal secretary to Eleanor Bron’s Kara. This time he would get to meet the Daleks on-screen, although it did not end well for Vogel, exterminated as his mistress’s plot to bring down Davros unravelled. He thus joined a select band of actors to have had two memorable death scenes in Doctor Who.

These latter two appearances in Doctor Who were both nice examples of Walters’ propensity for playing rather prissy, officious characters. It was gift that ensured him steady work in an extensive number of television dramas, many of them the most popular shows of their day: Z Cars, Private Schulz, Shine On Harvey Moon, Rumpole of the Bailey, All Creatures Great and Small and Heartbeat among them. Other notable roles included playing Charles Hawtrey in the Carry-On drama Cor Blimey (2000) and Stifford in a 1976 adaptation of Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger. Genre credits included playing Vic Thatcher in two episodes of BBC classic Survivors in 1975, and The New Avengers the following year.

He was versatile enough to enjoy a long career in comedy too. An early success came in sitcom The Larkins in 1963, and he followed it up in subsequent decades in a number of other popular shows: The Dick Emery Show, The Fenn Street Gang, George and Mildred and The Russ Abbott Show among them. There were a small number of film appearances, among them 1984 and Brimstone and Treacle. He would return to the world of Doctor Who with the role of Roderick Allingham in The Fearmonger for Big Finish.

Hugh Walters was born in Mexborough, South Yorksire on March 2nd 1939 and died on February 13th 2015.

(Via DoctorWhoNews)

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