Opinionated actor achieved late fame as the humane kommandant of Colditz

‘‘I love to be someone else, to show a part of me I am too shy to show. There is something in me desperately trying to get out.’’

Bernard Hepton, who has died aged 92, was best known to television viewers as the perfectly correct kommandant with a humane streak in Colditz ,as Archbishop Cranmer in the series The Six Wives of Henry VIII starring Keith Michell, and as Toby Esterhase in the John le Carre adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People with Alec Guinness.

However, off screen he was known for directing fights – including Richard Burton’s in Hamlet at the Old Vic and Laurence Olivier’s in the 1955 film of Richard III – and picking fights, such as his run-in with Peter Hall over the role of a national theatre and his battle with the proprietors of

Liverpool

Playhouse when he tried to move their repertoire beyond the standard fare.

Hepton’s idea of a national theatre ran counter to the accepted wisdom of a London building. ‘‘We don’t need one National Theatre, but six up and down the country – all with equal status and grants,’’ he declared with frustration in 1961, although his dreams were quickly squashed by Hall and others.

He created an even bigger storm in Liverpool, where he was appointed as the director of the Playhouse in 1963. Halfway through his first season, he staged Max Frisch’s dark comedy The Fire Raisers, about a town attacked by arsonists. It went down badly. ‘‘There was correspondence in the two Liverpool papers, from the dean of the cathedral down to the ordinary chap in the street,’’ he recalled.

Hepton loved the debate, but the theatre’s management was nervous, even more so when he followed it with John Osborne’s Luther, about one of the instigators of the Protestant Reformation. ‘‘I am a Catholic and I had the seller of indulgences played as a real bog-Irish priest and straight to the audience, like sermons,’’ Hepton said in 1976. ‘‘In Liverpool you might have expected that to hit some sort of nerve, but it was as though they never heard a word.’’

He was born Francis Bernard Heptonstall in Bradford, Yorkshire, and claimed to have been brought up on the same street as JB Priestley had 30 years earlier. His father, also Bernard, was an electrician, while his mother, Hilda, came from a family of mill workers. His only childhood experience of theatre was a visit to the pantomime when he was small.

After school, he tried to join the army during World War II, but his sight was so bad that he was classed as ‘‘almost blind’’. When asked to read the optician’s test card he could only echo the old joke: ‘‘What card?’’

He took up an apprenticeship in aeronautical engineering and served at night as a fire watcher in Bradford. ‘‘It was very boring,’’ he said in 2006. ‘‘The lady in charge of us all decided to bring some one-act plays in, and I didn’t even know what a play was.’’ He soon found that ‘‘doors began to open for me, a sort of magic land was there . . . and I became fascinated by it’’. Towards the end of the war the same lady pointed him toward Bradford Civic Playhouse, an amateur theatre operation, ‘‘and my education in plays and players began in earnest’’.

From there he went into rep, playing in York and Scarborough and turning his hand to ‘‘anything from Agatha Christie to Shakespeare’’. ‘‘It was a wonderful place to start because you were chucked in at the deep end.’’

After a couple of years he moved to London, sharing a flat in Crystal Palace with a friend, acquiring an agent, doing some acting at Windsor (‘‘1066 and All That, that was great fun’’) and keeping body and soul together by putting his draughtsman training to use.

In 1952 he realised a long-standing ambition by joining the Birmingham Repertory under Sir Barry Jackson, its founder. He was soon choreographing his own fight scenes for Shakespeare, word of which reached the Old Vic and led to opportunities in London. In 1957, he married the actress Nancie Jackson, who played his wife in the television film A Man for All Seasons (1957). They lived with a collection of paintings in Barnes, southwest London. Nancie died in 1977 and two years later Hepton married Hilary Liddell, a drama coach, who died in 2013. There were no children.

In 1963 Hepton was appointed as the director of Liverpool Playhouse, for a period he once summed up as: ‘‘Disaster, total disaster’’. By the end of his first season he had resigned to join the BBC in preparation for the arrival of BBC Two. He trained as a director (‘‘where to point the cameras and that sort of thing’’) and worked as a producer on the soap opera Compact and the Shakespeare plays Coriolanus (1965) and Troilus and Cressida (1966), but ‘‘nobody seemed to know what I was supposed to do next, and I certainly didn’t’’.

By the end of the 1960s he was in front of the cameras, appearing in Middlemarch (1968) and Z Cars. He narrated stories for the children’s TV show Jackanory, appeared in Jane Austen adaptations and played Archbishop Cranmer three times: The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1970; Elizabeth R in 1971 with Glenda Jackson; and Henry VIII and His Six Wives in 1972.

His most recognisable role was arguably in Colditz (1972-74), where he transcended the usual nasty Nazi stereotype to present a character of some subtlety trying to resist external pressure from the SS while running the prison camp with a degree of humanity.

Thanks to his versatility, Hepton, who enjoyed a pint and watching rugby league, was never typecast. As a result, he was rarely recognised. ‘‘I love to be someone else, to show a part of me I am too shy to show,’’ he once said of acting. ‘‘There is something in me desperately trying to get out.’’ –