Andrew Hall
Actor best known for Butterflies and later for Coronation Street
ANDREW HALL, the actor and director, who has died aged 65, first came to the attention of television viewers in 1978, just after leaving drama school, in Carla Lane’s sitcom Butterflies on BBC One. He played Russell Parkinson, one of two workshy, sex-obsessed teenage sons (the other being Nicholas Lyndhurst) of Wendy Craig’s frustrated housewife, Ria, and her husband Ben (Geoffrey Palmer), a reserved dentist and amateur lepidopterist.
Much later on, in 2011, he popped up for six months on ITV’S Coronation Street as cross-dressing Marc Selby, a well-spoken wine merchant, and love interest for the rival hairdressers Audrey Roberts (Sue Nicholls) and Claudia Colby (Rula Lenska), who become suspicious when they spot a mystery woman (his alter ego, Marcia) leaving his house.
“I was asked to keep the storyline secret and didn’t tell people until just before I appeared on screen,” Hall recalled. “You say, ‘I’m playing a serial killer who eats his victims’ and they go, ‘that’s nice’. When I said, ‘it’s a transvestite’, they’d immediately go, ‘oh’.”
The main drawback to the role was having to wear high heels: “Who knew they hurt so much? My sympathy goes out to any woman who has to wear them. The pain was unbelievable.”
Andrew Hall was born in Droylsden, Greater Manchester, on January 19 1954. His grandfather had been the manager of Oldham Batteries in the 1940s and 1950s and his father joined Burroughs Computers as a salesman, becoming UK vicepresident. Promotion involved moves to Marple and Lytham St Anne’s. Andrew’s first appearance on a professional stage was aged six on St Anne’s Pier with Al Read.
After drama school and his role in Butterflies, which ended in 1983, Hall worked extensively as an actor on stage and screen, including two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a run as Bill Anderson, a Swedish sailor and travel writer, in the West End
production of Mamma Mia! (2008-09). In 2013 he was Doctor Watson in a touring production of Mark Catley’s Sherlock Holmes: The Best Kept Secret.
On television he appeared in series such as Casualty, Hollyoaks, Eastenders, Doctors, Brookside, Holby City and Two Point Four Children. He portrayed the evangelist Billy Graham in Nixon’s the One for Sky Arts, and played “The Gentleman” in the science fiction series Blood Drive on Syfy (2017). His film credits included The Truth About Love and Gabriel Ernest.
Later he also worked as a director and producer, enjoying successes with productions that included Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? at the Trafalgar Studios in 2009.
Two years later he directed the London premiere of Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s Haunting Julia, a critically acclaimed study of grief, obsession and the supernatural centred on the story of a musical prodigy who was writing symphonies aged eight but was found dead at 19 in a pool of blood – and her father’s efforts to answer the question “Why?”
In 2014 he directed a touring production of Diane Samuels’s Kindertransport, a play exploring the relationship between mothers and daughters, set against the history of the trains that brought children, predominantly Jewish refugees, to Britain between 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War.
Andrew Hall is survived by his wife Abigail, and by their son and daughter.
Andrew Hall, born January 19 1954, died May 20 2019