Farewell Arthur Daley: Minder star dies

Dennis Waterman as Terry and George Cole in Minder (Getty)

George Cole, born April 22 1925, died August 5 2015

George Cole, the actor, who has died aged 90, was best-known as the devious and conniving Arthur Daley in the popular ITV series Minder and as Alastair Sim's crooked accomplice Flash Harry in the St Trinian's films of the 1950s.

One of the most endearing and enduring popular players of rueful light comedy, and once described as looking like "an amiable pall bearer", Cole played numerous untrustworthy characters in a career spanning 70 years. He believed that his "crafty but sad" appearance was responsible for his repeated casting in what he described as "spiv" roles.

Apart from a weakness for strong-smelling cigars and a passion for horse racing, Cole had little in common with the roguish Arthur Daley. An inveterate punter, he confessed that "the ITV Seven was my downfall. I got it the very first time, about pounds 1,100.

After that I couldn't leave it alone." It was perhaps just as well that Cole's portrayal of Arthur Daley had made him one of the highest-paid actors on British television.

Unlike his screen persona, Cole considered himself primarily a family man. After his unofficial adoption at the age of 16 by Alastair Sim and his wife, Naomi, Cole moved in with the couple.

When he later married, he built a house on a five-acre plot of land next to the Sims' home at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire and lived there with his own family.

Despite his long career Cole claimed that he had never been ambitious as an actor, insisting that he preferred "an afternoon pottering in the garden to almost anything". He distinguished himself from later generations of artists by taking up acting at the age of 14 to avoid starting work as a butcher's boy.

Cole claimed that his success was based on a sense of timing and a talent for droll facial expressions, skills he had learned from Alastair Sim whom he described as "one of the most talented actors in the business".

George Edward Cole was born on April 22 1925 in Tooting, south London, and adopted when he was 10 days old after being abandoned by his mother. Educated locally, he won a scholarship to the Surrey county council school at Morden, but his educational hopes were dashed when his father had to give up work because of illness.

"My father was gassed in the First World War and was an epileptic," Cole recalled. "He couldn't hold down a job, and when we couldn't pay the rent the council gave him a job pulling a road roller. That did for him in the end."

Cole - who described his upbringing as "the poorest you could get" - left school at 14 to help support his family. He worked as a newspaper delivery boy before gaining an apprenticeship with the local butcher.

Due to start at the butcher's on Monday morning, he answered an advertisement in The Star on Friday night that read "Boy wanted for West End show". He auditioned on the Saturday, declaring that he could recite a poem by Julius Caesar called Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Cole was offered a part and joined the touring company performing The White Horse Inn in 1939.

When the tour ended after six months, Cole returned home and made his London debut as a Cockney evacuee in Cottage to Let (Wyndham's, 1940). Hailed in The Daily Telegraph as "a very youthful actor with spirit and a grand sense of the occasion", Cole reprised the same role in the film version two years later, appearing for the first time opposite Alastair Sim. Sim and his wife were responsible for all Cole's theatrical training, including the thankless task of eradicating Cole's Cockney accent.

With Sim's help he appeared in his second film, Those Kids from Town (1942) before joining the RAF the following year. Cole ended his service career running an officers' mess bar in occupied Germany.

After the war Cole returned to acting, appearing in a variety of mediocre films including My Brother's Keeper (1948), The Spider and the Fly (1949) and Gone to Earth (1950). He had greater success with Alastair Sim in the classic comedies Laughter in Paradise (1951) and Scrooge (1952).

Over the next decade, Cole and Sim repeated their screen partnership in a string of films, the most successful of which were the St Trinian's series, directed by Frank Launder. In the first, The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), Cole (as the spiv Flash Harry) received third billing after Sim and Joyce Grenfell. The film was extremely successful and was followed by five more, including Blue Murder at St Trinian's (1958) and Cole's only film in the series without Sim, The Pure Hell of St Trinian's (1961).

Between films, Cole starred as the bumbling bachelor David Bliss in the long-running radio series A Life of Bliss (1952-67). The show was broadcast on Sunday afternoons. Cole recalled it as "wholesome to the point of nausea", and insisted that the best part of the show had been Percy Edwards's performance as Psyche the dog.

By the mid-1960s, along with the rest of the British film industry, Cole's film career had stalled. Parts dried up and Cole turned to the stage to revive his flagging fortunes. He worked consistently throughout the 1960s and 1970s in productions such as Banana Ridge, The Philanthropist and Too Good to be True. He also appeared in several musical hits such as Front Page (1981), The Pirates of Penzance (1982) and as Captain Hook in Peter Pan (1987).

George Cole as Arthur Daly in the tv series Minder, 1984 pictured with actress Chrissie Cotterill. (Thames Television)

But his greatest success came on his move into television, in series like The Bounder (1976) and Minder (1979). Cole was offered the part of Arthur Daley in Minder while making Dennis Potter's banned play, Brimstone and Treacle.

Minder was not an instant success, and the first two series flopped. But by 1984, the show had become a hit, with Cole becoming inseparably linked with the shifty second-hand car dealer Arthur Daley. He was not the first choice for the role, and recalled that the writer and most of the production team were unhappy about the casting. "Verity Lambert [the producer] was the only one who thought I'd do," he remembered, "and she was right."

Playing the part with droll understatement, he helped to revive Cockney rhyming slang and deployed many a fine malapropism - "The world is your lobster, my son" being one of the most memorable.

He was unable to account for his enormous success in the part or the longevity of the series, which ran until 1991. "It's a bit worrying really," he said. "After all, Arthur is a crook. He nearly always lets [his boneheaded bodyguard] Terry down and yet he's one of the most popular characters on television." Cole appeared in each series of Minder, seamlessly adapting to a new sidekick when Dennis Waterman left the programme.

Cole became so identified in the public's mind to the Arthur Daley character that even when he appeared away from the series - as in television commercials for the Leeds Building Society - Arthur's pork pie hat and sheepskin coat were in evidence. The series sold all over the world, making it (as Arthur himself would have noted) "a nice little earner" for ITV.

In 1991 Cole followed the final series of Minder with an appearance as Henry Root in the film dramatisation of The Henry Root Letters. Asked if he minded being typecast as a string of unscrupulous characters he replied: "I think it's just marvelous to be in work. Before Minder I never really knew where my next job was coming from. Now I'm booked up for the next two years." His later television work included appearances in staples such as Agatha Christie's Marple, Midsomer Murders and Heartbeat.

In the mid to late-1990s he played in two short-lived sitcoms, first as a lonely pensioner in My Good Friend and then as a cantankerous father in Dad.

He was appointed OBE in 1992.

George Cole was twice married, firstly in 1954 to Eileen Moore (dissolved 1966), and secondly in 1967 to Penelope Morrell, by each of whom he had a son and a daughter.