Jack Hedley

A robust, intense, arch British actor with pronounced military bearing, he began life as Jack Snowdon Hawkins. After leaving school, Jack attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, graduated and then served for eight years as a marine commando. He saw action in various theatres of conflict, including Korea, eventually attaining the rank of lieutenant. Invalided out of the service after being twice shot in the leg, he temporarily worked in his mother's office services business but found this to be unsatisfactory. On the off chance, he auditioned for an acting course at RADA, was accepted and had a diploma in hand by 1957. However, in order to avoid confusion with the already established film star and registered Equity member Jack Hawkins, he was compelled to adopt a new stage moniker. As Jack Hedley he made his London stage debut playing Doctor Doolittle in Pygmalion (opposite Glenda Jackson) and was soon thereafter cast in leading roles at the West End and at the Theatre Royal in Bath in F. Hugh Herbert's play The Moon is Blue. For the most part, Hedley was best served by television, in which medium he became a familiar presence, first and foremost in military-themed action dramas and crime thrillers. His initial impact on the screen was as a flamboyant undercover agent in the Francis Durbridge-conceived serial The World of Tim Frazer (1960). Not until Colditz (1972) did Hedley have another starring turn in a series, but he is well remembered in this classic POW drama as the morally upright, disciplinarian and typically stiff-upper-lip lieutenant-commander, senior officer among British prisoners at the supposedly escape-proof German castle fortress. Hedley's other TV roles have included Phyllis Calvert's editor in Kate (1970) and an ex-soldier and former resistance fighter revisiting the past after returning to the island of Crete in the mini-series Who Pays the Ferryman? (1977). He also had guest spots in, among other shows, UFO (1970), Special Branch (1969), 'Allo 'Allo! (1982) and Dalziel and Pascoe (1996) . Hedley was largely underused in films, his first ventures to the big screen including small parts in Room at the Top (1958) and, as a reporter, in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) (which also featured 'the other' Jack Hawkins). Meatier roles eventually came his way, notably as Kim Novak's lover in W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1964), as headmaster William Baxter in the Peter O'Toole remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969) and as the ill-fated marine archaeologist and millionaire yachtsman Sir Timothy Havelock in For Your Eyes Only (1981) (Hedley also providing the voice for Havelock's parrot). The thrice-married Jack Hedley retired from screen acting in 2000. He passed away after a short illness on December 11 2021 at the age of 92.