Actor who played Dr Gordon in
the 1970s screen phenomenon of The Adventures of Black Beauty
William
Lucas, who has died aged 91, was already a veteran television actor before he
played Dr. Gordon in The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972-74). In a
three-channel age, the programme became essential Sunday-teatime viewing for
many families and regularly appeared in the weekly Top 20 TV ratings with
stories that were a continuation, rather than an adaptation, of those in Anna
Sewell’s best-selling 19th-century novel.
Lucas
and his co-stars – Judi Bowker and Roderick Shaw as the doctor’s children,
Vicky and Kevin, and Charlotte Mitchell as his loyal housekeeper, Amy Winthrop
– found themselves part of a screen phenomenon that owed much to writers such
as Ted Willis and Richard Carpenter. Denis King’s Galloping Home theme tune
evoked childhood memories that led to it being heard over future decades in
other programmes – perhaps most memorably in Absolutely Fabulous, accompanying
Jennifer Saunders’s dream of running through a field, Black Beauty-style.
Lucas’s
character, James Gordon, is a widowed GP moving from London to set up a country
practice in the village of Five Oaks. He saves the life of the disabled owner
of a black stallion – and is presented with the animal as thanks. His children
are seen enjoying adventures with Black Beauty, often bringing villains to
heel. For the second series, Stacy Dorning played the doctor’s other daughter,
Jenny, returning from school and replacing the departing Bowker.
The
programme’s popularity led to Lucas and Dorning reprising their roles two
decades later for The New Adventures of Black Beauty, a 1990-91 series produced
by a New Zealand television company that showed Dr. Gordon and the grown-up
Jenny emigrating.
The
actor was born William Clucas, the son of Albert, who worked in a Sheffield
steelworks, and his wife, Ada (nee Mellor). He had an older sister, Joan, who
took him to the cinema, where he enjoyed Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy
films, as well as Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals.
On
leaving Burnage high school, Manchester, Clucas worked in a bank, then served
in the Royal Navy during the second world war. A string of jobs followed – from
cafe chef to farm labourer and lorry driver – before he achieved his ambition
to train as an actor by winning a scholarship to the Northern
Theatre School, established by the Bradford Civic Playhouse’s artistic
director, Esme Church. Advised that his surname was too obscure, he changed it
to Lucas.
He
began his career in 1948 as an assistant stage manager at Chesterfield Civic Theatre, where he met Doreen
Moorhouse, who acted under the name Rowena Ingram. They married in 1954.
Repertory work followed in Coventry, Liverpool, Richmond, Windsor and at the
Bristol Old Vic. Later, Lucas appeared in the West End as Frank Thorney in the
tragicomedy The Witch of Edmonton (Mermaid theatre, 1962) and Martello in Tom
Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (Duke of York’s theatre, 1988-89).
His
big television break came with the part of the blackmailing car dealer Reg
Dorking in Portrait of Alison (1955), a crime
thriller serial written by Francis Durbridge. Lucas was the only cast member to
reprise his role for a film version later the same year (released in the US as
Postmark for Danger).
On
TV, he was a regular as David Graham in The Strange World of Planet X (1956),
Charlton Bradbury in The Crime of the Century (1956-57), Jim Pereira in the
second series (1958) of the hotel saga The Royalty, Jonathan Briggs in the
serialisation of Frank Tilsley’s novel Champion Road (1958) and Durea in the
London underworld thriller Solo for Canary (1958).
He
starred in The Infamous John Friend (1959), in the title role of the smuggler
and spy for Napoleon, and was Detective Inspector Mitchell in the crime dramas
The Days of Vengeance (1960) and Flower of Evil (1961), and Eddie Prior in the
thriller serial The Prior Commitment (1969).
Lucas
appeared in many television plays and was Inspector Lestrade, perfectly
portraying his smug character’s wrong deductions, in A Study in Scarlet and The
Second Stain, two 1968 episodes in the Sherlock Holmes series starring Peter
Cushing. He even took the title role in a TV production of Rigoletto (1958),
recalling: “Happily, the singing was dubbed.” The best of Lucas’s later
television performances was in The Spoils of War (1980-81) as George Hayward,
the Labour party-supporting father in a Lake District family coming to terms
with peace after the second world war.
There
were also appearances in three soap operas, the first, in 1966, as Bill Finlay
in the football serial United! In Coronation Street, he had a short run as
Dennis Maxwell (1971), the crooked personnel manager at the Mark Brittain
Warehouse who had an affair with Elsie Tanner, and he later played Judge
Parrish (1996), who found Steve and Vicky McDonald guilty of conspiracy to
pervert the course of justice after accepting stolen whisky. He was a regular
in the short-lived British-expats serial Eldorado (1992-93), as Stanley Webb, a
retired doctor formerly in the Royal Army Medical Corps who was revealed not to
be married to his “wife” Rosemary, but eventually tied the knot.
The
early years of the new century saw him in episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, Doctors
and The Bill (2005).
Lucas’s
film roles included William Morel in Sons and Lovers (1960), the leader of a
gang of crooks in Touch of Death (1961), an ex-convict being blackmailed in The
Marked One (1963) and Jacob Venable, the criminal nephew hunting for the feline
witness to a murder, in the Hammer Films production The Shadow of the Cat
(1961).
In
retirement, Lucas enjoyed DIY – keeping his lifelong fondness for carpentry going
– as well as fishing and cooking.
He
is survived by his second wife, Camilla (nee Idris-Jones), whom he married in
1993, and by Daniel and Thomas, the sons of his first marriage, which ended in
divorce.
• William Lucas (William
Thomas Clucas), actor, born 14 April 1925; died 8 July 2016
