Michael Angelis
Actor who starred in ‘Boys from the Blackstuff ’ and narrated ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’
MICHAEL Angelis, who died on May 30 aged 76, was a Liverpudlian actor whose lugubrious style proved equally effective in both drama and comedy; he won his greatest acclaim in the 1980s in the searing television drama Boys from the Blackstuff, and later succeeded Ringo Starr as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Saturnine and curly-haired, Angelis first gained wide recognition in the long-running BBC sitcom The Liver Birds, joining the cast in 1975 as Lucien, the downbeat, philosophising brother of Carol Boswell (Elizabeth Estensen).
Lucien was promoted to the central character in a spin-off film called Me You and Him (1979), and Angelis returned when The Liver Birds was briefly revived, after a 17-year gap, in 1996.
In 1980 Angelis was cast as Chrissie Todd in Alan Bleasdale’s The Black Stuff, an episode of Play for Today focused on a group of men laying tarmac. The characters returned in Bleasdale’s series Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), set in a Liverpool floundering under mass unemployment.
Bernard Hill gave the most widely discussed performance, as the volatile Yosser Hughes — with his memorable catchphrase “Gizza job!” — but Angelis was also superb in the quieter role of Chrissie, emasculated by unemployment and enduring the deterioration of his marriage to Angie (Julie Walters).
Angelis became a member of Alan Bleasdale’s unofficial repertory company, appearing in his film No Surrender (1985) — Angelis threatened to walk out when the director refused to cast Julie Walters in the film, although by the time the decision was reversed she was engaged on another project — and the television dramas GBH (1991) and Melissa (1997).
Angelis had grown up in the unprepossessing Liverpool neighbourhood of Dingle, a few streets away from Ringo Starr, and in 1991 took over from the former Beatle as the narrator of the animation Thomas and Friends, based on the railway stories of the Reverend W Awdry. Angelis matched Starr’s deadpan but expressive style perfectly, continuing in the job for more than a quarter of a century.
Michael Angelis was born in Paddington on April 29, 1944 (some sources say 1952; Angelis was reticent about the details of his private life). His father, Evangelos Angelis, was a Greek immigrant; his mother Margaret (nee McCulla) died when he was small.
Michael’s older brother was the actor and writer Paul Angelis, who became well-known as PC Bruce Bannerman in Z Cars and, by coincidence, was the voice of Ringo Starr in the Beatles animation Yellow Submarine.
Michael was brought up in Liverpool and returned there to work at the Everyman Theatre after studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. In 1972 he went to London in search of better opportunities. For many years he lived in Chelsea, where he was a drinking companion of George Best.
Angelis had guest roles in Coronation Street, Minder, Lovejoy, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and Midsomer Murders. His stage roles ranged from Willy Russell’s One for the Road with Russ Abbott (Lyric Theatre, 1987) to Brecht’s Mother Courage (Olympia, Dublin, 2001) with Tyne Daly.
After a brief marriage in the 1970s, Michael Angelis’s second marriage was to Helen Worth, famous for her long-running role as Gail Platt in Coronation Street, although he did not enjoy the tabloid press attention that the relationship brought him. After their divorce he married, in 2001, Jennifer Khalastchi, who survives him.