Smooth-talking actor who found his style going out of fashion

Gareth Hunt : Gareth Hunt, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 64, was an actor whose smooth and steely presence made him…

Gareth Hunt: Gareth Hunt, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 64, was an actor whose smooth and steely presence made him an ideal Frederick the Footman in the last series of television's Upstairs, Downstairsin 1975, and Mike Gambit, Joanna Lumley's crime-fighting partner in The New Avengersin 1976, but whose gifts were not used as regularly as he and his admirers might have wished.

In later years, he became well known as the advertising face of Nescafé, with a shake of his hand revealing coffee beans.

Tall and saturnine, and with an ominous stony look in his eyes, Hunt would have fitted more easily into the great days of the British film industry in the years spanning the second World War, when heavyweight personalities and stiff upper lips were more in fashion.

Alternating between television, undistinguished movies and respectable stage work that included the English National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was never lucky enough to play a character that both suited him and took a firm grip on the public. His stage work, including pantomime, often took him to the English regions and abroad, as with Run for Your Wifeto Florida and New York. Films also required extensive travel: in 1997, he was in Ukraine filming Marco Polowith Jack Palance.

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Having that slightly sinister, glassy gaze, Hunt could play heroes or dastardly villains with equal facility. Some of his enterprises were bizarre, including a 1984 comic horror film, B lood Bath at the House of Death, starring Vincent Price, Kenny Everett and Pamela Stephenson, and a Swedish film called The Forgotten Wells(1990), in which a television crew were held hostage in the sewers by two armed thugs, all of whom then came across a psychopathic half-man half-beast who had lived underground since he was a child.

Hunt was equally at home playing those on the right side of the law, especially smooth-talking, tough police officers. In 1997 alone, he played two such characters - Inspector Masefield in Fierce Creatures, the unsatisfactory follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, and Inspector Bass in Parting Shots, made by Michael Winner and described in the Observeras among the worst British films ever made. In 1989, long after Frederick the Footman, Hunt played a coachman in a Barbara Cartland story adapted for television, The Lady and the Highwayman, an illustration of the fact that parts that could accommodate him were now in short supply.

Hunt was born in Battersea, south London, the nephew of the actor Martita Hunt. At 15 he joined the merchant navy, and served for six years before jumping ship in New Zealand and spending three months in a military prison. On returning to Britain, he took a number of dead-end jobs to raise money, including road digger, door-to-door salesman and stagehand, while he nursed his theatrical ambitions. He also worked in an ITV studio before taking a BBC design course, ending up eventually at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.

His next step was repertory at Ipswich, Bristol, Coventry, Watford and the Royal Court in London. He was in the 1975 National Theatre production of Hamlet, when the company was still operating from the Old Vic, and in the 1978 RSC production of Antony and Cleopatraat the Aldwych, where he also appeared in Philip Magdalany's Section Nine.

But it was television that established him with the public. In 1974, he was in six episodes of Planet of the Spidersin the Doctor Whoseries; the following year he was in the episode The Guardian of Piriin the Space: 1999series, and in The Hanged Manseries episode The Bridgemaker. That was the year he became Frederick the Footman.

Hunt had a history of heart attacks, the last in July 2002, while he was appearing in Absurd Person Singularat the Pier Theatre, Bournemouth. Married three times, he is survived by his wife Amanda and three sons.

Alan Leonard "Gareth" Hunt: born February 7th, 1943; died March 14th, 2007.