Cockney actor struck gold as Arthur Daley
George Cole, actor: b London, April 22, 1925; m Eileen Moore (diss), Penny Morrell, 2d, 2s; d Reading, August 5, 2015, aged 90.
FROM the moment that George Cole glanced at a synopsis of the character of Arthur Daley he knew he had struck gold. ‘‘It said Arthur Daley is firmly behind the home secretary on crime and punishment, his favourite film is The Godfather, and he dresses like a dodgy member of the Citizens Advice Bureau. That’s all I needed.’’
The actor then created one of television’s most loveable rogues – the devious and cheerfully corrupt used-car salesman and wheelerdealer Arthur Daley, who bestrides London’s cockney underworld in Minder.
From 1979 the ITV comedy drama latched on to the mood of Thatcher’s Britain and by the mid1980s was drawing audiences in excess of 17 million. Viewers tuned in to enjoy the misadventure resulting from Daley’s latest get-rich-quickscheme and to see if his longsuffering ‘‘minder’’ – played by Dennis Waterman – could extricate him.
The show, which ran for 15 years, was the jewel in the crown of Cole’s distinguished career in which he had risen to prominence playing the spiv Flash Harry in the St Trinian’s film franchise of the 1950s and 1960s. If that meant that Cole ended up being unfairly typecast, he could at least reflect, as Daley might, that he was on to ‘‘a nice little earner’’.
Cole’s achievement was to render attractive a character without a single redeeming feature, whose survivalist instincts combined with a deeprooted cowardice and allowed him to unashamedly flee whenever physical danger threatened, leaving others to carry the can.
Arthur Daley’s argot from the cockney underworld entered the British lexicon. Cole was pleased to learn that Daley’s reference to his disdained spouse as ‘‘Er indoors’’ was included in the Oxford Dictionary of Slang.
Daley contributed many other memorable phrases such as ‘‘A friend in need . . . is a pest’’, as well as malapropisms, such as ‘‘He’s an invertebrate liar’’. Cole’s personal favourite was ‘‘the world is your lobster’’, which he had heard in a restaurant; he promptly paid his fellow diner £25 out of gratitude, knowing the line would be perfect for Daley.
A mild-mannered and gentlemanly figure, with a discernible touch of melancholia, he insisted that he would do Minder only if there were no swear words in it, while his costar and friend Waterman remembered having to drag him along to the pub to have a drink with the rest of the cast because Cole preferred to make a quiet exit back to his Oxfordshire home.
The creators of Minder knew that Cole had created a zeitgeist for the times when Labour’s Denis Healey taunted Margaret Thatcher across the dispatch box not long into her first administration, accusing her of combining ‘‘the diplomacy of Alf Garnett with the economics of Arthur Daley’’.
George Cole was born in Morden in 1925. His real mother abandoned him when he was 10 days old and he was adopted by a cockney couple, George and Florence Cole.
There was no shortage of love in the house and he never showed any interest in tracing his real parents.
On leaving school at 14 he became a butcher’s delivery boy. In 1939 he answered a newspaper advert, ‘‘Boy Wanted for Musical’’. Cole gave the ‘‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’’ speech from Julius Caesar at his audition in a broad cockney accent and landed a walkon part in a touring production of White Horse Inn. Cole left immediately for Blackpool after buying a shirt, make-up and a suitcase. He sent a telegram to his parents: ‘‘Gone on stage. Will write.’’
Before he was 16 he was on the West End stage. Cole lived with fellow actor Alastair Sim and his wife Naomi at their home in Oxfordshire from early in his career. He later had a house built next door to the Sims where, with his family, he was to live for the rest of his life.
In 1943, Cole was called up and joined the RAF. He claimed that he spent most of his war service running officers’ mess bars or shovelling coal.
In 1944 he was given leave to appear in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. Demobbed, Cole returned to the London stage where in 1947 he starred in the play Dr Angelus, which he described as one of the high points of his career. Over the next two decades Cole appeared in numerous British films.
He appeared with Sim in The Belles of St Trinian’s in 1954, followed by Blue Murder at St Trinian’s. Sim, in drag, played the distracted headmistress of the school of anarchic girls; Cole in wide-shouldered topcoat, long side-burns, a lurching walk and a drawn-on moustache, was Flash Harry – a prototype ‘‘wide-boy’’ who smuggles in gin for the girls and places bets for them.
Cole had two children with his first wife Eileen Moore. Crispin became a musician, while Harriet became an actress. With second wife Penny Morrell, they had Tara and Toby.
Both Harriet and Crispin moved out to live with their mother and became estranged from their father; Cole was eventually reconciled with his son.
In the Seventies he starred in Don’t Forget to Write, playing Gordon Maple, a playwright who would do anything to avoid sitting at a typewriter. Cole was the ideal choice because, as he readily admitted, he was himself a ‘‘great fan of not working’’.
Cole remained a relative outsider in the acting world. He did not have an agent and preferred a quiet life in rural Oxfordshire. Despite poor health after heart surgery in 2002, he continued to act. He said that in weaker moments he missed Arthur Daley ‘‘terribly’’.
When Minder was remade in 2009, Cole watched with disgust from his sofa, calling it ‘‘appalling’’. ‘‘It irked me that neither Dennis nor I were asked to give any input – until it was time to promote it.’’
In any case, the mood of the times that he had perfectly captured the first time around had long gone.
‘‘He was a product of Thatcherism; an entrepreneur, and he had photos of the Queen and Mrs Thatcher on his wall. I couldn’t see him having Cameron there. Could you?’’
Arthur Daley’s argot from the cockney underworld entered the British lexicon.