Latest news with #GeraldHarper
The Sun
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
BBC star who rose to fame in 60s & dated Coupling's Sarah Alexander dies aged 96 as tributes pour in
A BBC star who rose to fame in the 60s and dated Sarah Alexander has died aged 96. Gerald Harper, who made his name on British TV, sadly passed away on Wednesday, his agent confirmed. 3 3 3 CDM Talent Agency posted on social media: "It is with great sadness that Gerald Harper has recently passed away - he was a valued client before he went to Spain to enjoy his retirement." It is unclear where the actor died or his cause of death. Gerald is best known for starring as the lead role in the adventure drama Adam Adamant Lives! and then as the main character in Hadleigh. Following his TV career, he returned to his main passion in theatre. His classical work includes playing on Broadway with the Old Vic company, playing Iago at the Bristol Old Vic and Benedick at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Gerald forged an illustrious career on the stage, featuring in various West End shows, including Crucifer of Blood and A Personal Affair at the Haymarket Theatre. The charismatic performer presented The Sunday Affair for Capital Radio in the 1970s. Gerald also hosted a series of Saturday afternoon shows for BBC Radio 2 in the early 1990s, in which he played classic songs from the past and gave away bottles of champagne and chocolates. The star will also be well remembered for his relationship with Coupling and Green Wing star Sarah Alexander. Sarah, 54, was only 25 when she was first spotted dating Gerald Harper, then 68, in 1996. Gerald was in his early 70s when Sarah, then aged around 30, became lovers. Sarah was at the height of her own fame at the time, as she was a regular in sitcom Coupling. A passer-by told the Sunday People of Gerald and Sarah at the time: "They were super-glued together! They were all over each other and didn't care who saw them. "Funnily enough, the young lady was making a lot of the running and kept grabbing him to French kiss him – it was quite a display." Friends said Harper was "absolutely bereft" when Sarah left him for Amandaland star Peter Serafinowicz in 2002. Before his relationship with Sarah, Gerald was married to Carla Rabaiotti, a former Pan American air stewardess. The pair, who later divorced in 1983, share a son. Harper was previously married to actress Jane Downs from 1957 until they divorced in 1975. They share a daughter. At the height of his fame Harper was TV's most eligible bachelor in ITV's Hadleigh, which ran from 1969 to 1976.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Coupling star Sarah Alexander's former lover Gerald Harper dies aged 96 as tributes pour in for Hadleigh actor
Coupling star Sarah Alexander's former lover Gerald Harper had died aged 96. The actor was well-known to 60s and 70s TV audiences as the suave star of Hadleigh, and before that Adam Adamant Lives!, an Edwardian gent who finds himself propelled into London in the swinging sixties. CDM Talent Agency confirmed the sad news in a statement on social media on Friday. They wrote: 'It is with great sadness that Gerald Harper has recently passed away - he was a valued client before he went to Spain to enjoy his retirement.' Sarah, 54, was only 25 when she was first spotted dating Gerald Harper, then 68, in 1996. A passer-by told the Sunday People of Alexander and Harper: 'They were super-glued together! They were all over each other and didn't care who saw them. 'Funnily enough, the young lady was making a lot of the running and kept grabbing him to French kiss him – it was quite a display.' When Sarah, whose big TV break would come in Coupling with Jack Davenport in 2000, moved in with Harper in his large Notting Hill house, friends' eyebrows were raised, especially as she is eight years younger than her new boyfriend's daughter, confusingly also named Sarah. But they refused to allow the generation gap to get in their way. Friends said Harper was 'absolutely bereft' when Sarah left him for Amandaland star Peter Serafinowicz in 2002. Before his relationship with Sarah, Gerald was married to Carla Rabaiotti, a former Pan American air stewardess. The pair, who later divorced in 1983, share a son. Harper was previously married to actress Jane Downs from 1957 until they divorced in 1975. They share a daughter. At the height of his fame Harper was TV's most eligible bachelor in ITV's Hadleigh, which ran from 1969 to 1976. He was perfectly cast as urbane English toff James Hadleigh, a wealthy, handsome playboy who lived in a mansion in the West Riding and ran the local newspaper. He told the Express in 2006: 'There wasn't that much to watch back then, so we had huge audiences. 'The top brass at Yorkshire Television didn't think Hadleigh would work, though, and placed us very late at night. 'When they realised they were wrong, they apologised. I tore up my contract and said: 'Shall we start again?' 'Not only did I get more money, I was given the loan of a country estate for a year complete with staff. I lived like a lord. It was very glamorous. 'I was a TV star on my own terms and for the best part of 20 years I virtually didn't have a day off.' Following his TV career, he returned to his main love, the theatre. His classical work includes playing on Broadway with the Old Vic company, playing Iago at the Bristol Old Vic and Benedick at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Age never held Harper back, and when he was approaching his 75th birthday, he flew to the Masai Mara in a light aircraft and rode horseback across Kenya's Masai Mara game park. On the return leg, the plan crashed through a hedge and ended up on its side. He recalled: 'I turned to the pilot and said: 'Do not bother with the next venue, my good man. Just get me the hell out of here to Nairobi and civilisation!' Enough was enough.' A former pupil at Haileybury public school, he originally planned to become a doctor, but caught the acting bug while doing his National Service and won a place at RADA.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gerald Harper obituary
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
