Gerald Harper obituary

The Guardian

8 hours ago

Suave adventurers operating in intelligence or as undercover agents were all the rage on television in the 1960s: Roger Moore in The Saint, Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man, Patrick Macnee in The Avengers and, in more explicitly comic vein, Gerald Harper in the 1966-67 cult series Adam Adamant Lives!
Harper, who has died aged 96, played an Edwardian swordsman and crime fighter, Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant, who returns to life in the swinging 60s after being frozen in ice for six decades. Devised by the BBC in direct response to ITV's The Saint, it was the brainchild of the executive Sydney Newman and the producer Verity Lambert, who had launched Doctor Who in 1963. But it lasted only a year.
Harper switched channels to play a Yorkshire newspaper proprietor, James Hadleigh, in ITV's Gazette (1968), and his character proved so popular that he was both modified and upgraded to the status of country squire and merchant banker, seriously at odds with the modern world – as Adam Adamant had been.
Hadleigh, in which Harper zoomed smoothly about in a white sports car settling minor local injustices, was one of the biggest hit series of the modern television era, attracting audiences of more than 10 million, sometimes 17 million, week in, week out, between 1969 and 1976 on ITV.
And Harper became something of a middle-aged heart-throb, a role he enthusiastically embraced when playing himself as a popular middlebrow disc jockey in later life, first on Capital Radio in the 1970s and then BBC Radio 2 in the 90s, dispensing champagne and chocolates to listeners on his Saturday Selection.
The secret of Harper's success was that he never fell out of fashion because he was a cultural anachronism to start with, a self-knowing, lighter comic version of, say, David Niven or Ronald Colman. And he had the good looks, style and innate sense of humour to carry this off, having honed his technique in years of stage work in Strindberg and Shaw, as well as in light comedy.
At the height of his television fame he appeared on the London stage in comedy thrillers by Francis Durbridge: in Suddenly at Home (1971) at the Fortune – co-starring Penelope Keith and Rula Lenska – he was the volatile Glen Howard, planning to bump off his wealthy wife and abscond with his lover; in House Guest (1981) at the Savoy, with Susan Hampshire, he was an international film star caught up in a kidnap crisis. But, in between, he was also in Jean Louis-Barrault's outrageous Rabelais at the Roundhouse and played Iago at the Bristol Old Vic.
Harper was born in London, the son of a stockbroker, Ernest Harper, and his wife, Mary (nee Thomas), and educated at Haileybury college, in Hertfordshire. After national service and a brief spell as a medical student, he trained as an actor at Rada in 1949. He made a 1951 debut at the Arts theatre in London in several short plays by Shaw, then joined the Liverpool Rep. He became a West End regular.
In 1955 he was Jack Chesney in Charley's Aunt starring Frankie Howerd at the Globe, and in 1957 he sang: 'Her mummy doesn't like me any more' in Free As Air by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds at the Savoy, a romantic, whimsical follow-up to the authors' Salad Days, set on a fictional version of Sark in the Channel Islands. He toured with the Old Vic and made his New York debut as Sebastian in Twelfth Night in 1958 and returned to London to co-star with Alec Guinness and Harry Andrews in Ross (1960), Terence Rattigan's play about Lawrence of Arabia, at the Haymarket.
His television fame had not been a likely outcome of a modest roster of film appearances. He was barely noticeable as an RAF officer in his first movie, The Dam Busters (1955), but he rose through the ranks as a major in the Highland regiment in Ronald Neame's Tunes of Glory (1960), starring Guinness, and as an army captain in Basil Dearden's comedy The League of Gentlemen (also 1960), starring Jack Hawkins. And he popped up, in civvies, in two of the first three Cliff Richard movies, The Young Ones (1961) and Wonderful Life (1964).
Once Hadleigh had run its course, Harper was a headline name wherever he appeared: as a magisterial QC in Royce Ryton's The Royal Baccarat Scandal (1988) at Chichester and the Haymarket, with Keith Michell and Fiona Fullerton; or as a less respectable grandee, the brothel-chain owner Sir George Crofts, in Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in 2000.
He defied typecasting as Friar Laurence in a 2006 tour of Romeo and Juliet, and often played in touring casts of former TV stars, such as that including Peter Byrne (Dixon of Dock Green) and Jennifer Wilson (The Brothers) in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, for the producer Bill Kenwright in 2008.
Harper was twice married, and twice divorced. His first marriage, from 1957 to 1975, was to the actor Jane Downs; his second, from 1976 to 1983, to Carla Rabiotti, an air hostess. He is survived by a daughter, Sarah Jane, from his first marriage, and a son, Jamie, from his second.
Michael Coveney
Gerald Harper, actor, born 15 February 1929; died 2 July 2025