----- Original Message -----

From: Cal Westray

To: Mike_Gambit@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 16, 2007 11:29 AM

Subject: [Mike_Gambit] Obit to Gareth

Thanks to Margaret, she found this on a Guardian website.
I couldn't access it, without subscribing to it.

http://www.mediaguardian.co.uk/

Dennis Barker
Wednesday March 14, 2007

Gareth Hunt, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 65, was an actor
whose smooth, stately and steely presence made him an ideal
Frederick the Footman in the last series of the cult television
programme Upstairs, Downstairs in 1974 and Mike Gambit, Joanna
Lumley's crime-fighting partner in The New Avengers in 1976, but was
not used as regularly as he and his admirers could have wished. In
later years he became well known as the face of Nescaf? with a
trademark hand unclenched to reveal 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,
but was sometimes rather adrift in the more anodyne days that
followed.

Alternating between television, undistinguished cinema films, and
respectable stage work that included the 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 regions
and abroad: Run For Your Wife to Florida and New York. Films also
required extensive travel: in 1997 he was in the Ukraine filming
Marco Polo with Jack Palance.

Having that slightly sinister glassy gaze, he could play heroes or
dastardly villains with equal facility. Some of his enterprises were
bizarre, including a 1984 comic horror film, Blood Bath at the House
of Death, starring Vincent Price, Kenny Everett and Pamela
Stephenson, and a Swedish film called The Forgotten Wells, in which
a television crew were held hostage in sewers by two armed thugs.

Hunt was equally at home playing those on the right side of the law,
especially smoothly tough police officers. In one year alone, 1997,
he played two inspectors, Inspector Masefield in the British film
Fierce Creatures, the unsatisfactory follow-up to A Fish Called
Wanda, and Inspector Bass in another British film, Parting Shots,
made by Michael Winner and described by the Observer as among the
worst British films ever made.

In 1989, long after his Frederick the Footman in Upstairs,
Downstairs, he 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 extremely
short supply.

Gareth Hunt was born Ian Leonard Hunt, nephew of the actor Martita
Hunt in Battersea, London.

He was 15 when he went into the merchant navy, and he served for six
years before jumping ship in New Zealand and spending three months
in a military prison.

Returning to Britain, he had a number of dead-end jobs to raise
funds, including road digger, door-to-door salesman and stagehand,
while he nursed his theatrical ambitions.

He also had a job 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, before the Royal Shakespeare Company
and the National Theatre. He was in the National Theatre production
of Hamlet in 1975 when it was still operating from the Old Vic and
in Antony and Cleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the
Aldwych in 1978.

He was also in Section Nine at the Aldwych.

It was television which established Hunt. In 1974 he was in six
episodes of Planet of the Spiders in the Doctor Who series, in the
following year he was in the episode The Guardian of Piri in the
Space: 1999 series, and in The Hanged Man series episode The
Bridgemaker. In the same year he became Frederick the Footman, which
made him famous enough to be considered for film roles.

The 1979 film adaptation of Jackie Collins's The World is Full of
Married Men saw him as Jay Grossman, one of the many Hollywood
weasels abusing women, and in the same year he also played in two
other British films, Licensed to Love and Kill, a James Bond spoof,
and The House on Garibaldi Street, a serious film about an attempt
by the Israeli secret service Mossad to catch a Nazi war criminal.

The 80s were not kind to him artistically. In 1981 he played in the
BBC TV miniseries of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and in the
Minder series; but his other television work, A Hazard of Hearts and
The Lady and the Highwayman, won no great critical praise, and his
film work Funny Money, Bloodbath at the House of Death, It Couldn't
Happen Here and A Chorus of Disapproval were not mainstream.

But he carried on working throughout the 90s, including presenting a
series of excerpts from the Upstairs, Downstairs series on its 25th
anniversary in 1996.

In the same year he "abandoned" acting for business, starting a
company to produce video films for aspiring performers, which they
could present to producers without having to go to auditions in
person, but its success could be measured by the fact that he soon
returned to acting. He was a regular in the ITV soap opera Night and
Day.

Hunt had had several heart attacks in the past and he had a further
attack in July 2002 when he was appearing in Absurd Person Singular
at the Pier Theatre, Bournemouth.
Married three times, he is survived by his wife Amanda and three
sons.

? Gareth Hunt (Alan Leonard Hunt), actor, born February 7 1943; died
March 14 2007