Classically trained actor has great success with Blake 7

Gareth Thomas made a huge impact on British and international audiences in the 1970s as the perm-haired, eponymous hero of Blakes 7, the cult BBC science-fiction series that attracted 10 million viewers in the UK at its peak.

The classically trained actor quit after two series but could not escape typecasting; he was underwhelmed with offers of new parts.

Blakes 7 continued for another two series after his character, a galactic resistance fighter, went ‘‘missing in action’’.

Thomas returned for a guest appearance in which his character was killed.

The message went out to producers and directors that he was now definitely available for other work.

‘‘I quit to escape Blake,’’ he said in an interview in 1997.

‘‘But it’s something that I’ve never been able to shrug off and I’ve had to learn to live with it. At least I have lost the perm.’’

Thomas appeared in dozens of other television series, but never found another role as memorable as Blake.

Although of Welsh stock, he was born Gareth Daniel Noake Thomas in Brentford, London, in 1945.

He grew up mainly in the little town of Criccieth in Wales, though he also spent time in London, Edinburgh and Leamington Spa when his father, Kenneth, became managing director of John Lewis.

He went to King’s College, Canterbury, and attended a selection board for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he was asked to talk, off the cuff, on a subject of his choosing.

He launched into a little lecture on the theatre and was so convincing that he persuaded himself that he should be an actor instead.

Thomas went to Rada, worked as an actor in provincial theatre and graduated to the West End and small roles on television.

He honed his art at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s, earning pounds 20 a week and working 14-hour days.

It paid off. His breakthrough role on television was as a young lawyer in Sutherland’s Law, a one-off BBC Drama Playhouse production in 1972 that became a series the year after. He also played the minister in a BBC adaptation of How Green Was My Valley.

Blakes 7 was created by Terry Nation, co-creator of the Daleks on Doctor Who.

The first series went out in 1978, the year after Star Wars.

The butch Blake bore some resemblance to Harrison Ford’s character Han Solo in the film.

The plot was a mix of Star Wars and The Dirty Dozen, with Blake leading a motley bunch of escaped convicts in a stolen spaceship called the Liberator. The fugitives pitted themselves against the totalitarian Terran Federation in a dystopian future.

The budget was minuscule, sets were shaky, costumes looked cheap, a Surrey quarry doubled for an alien planet, and it seemed that the producers could not even afford an apostrophe for the title.

However, the morally ambiguous characters gave it a certain depth and, unusually for that time, the women in the show were tough and resourceful.

Blakes 7’s success brought Thomas a degree of unwanted fame and the inevitable callings out in the street.

He said he hated watching himself on television so when he once walked into a pub where Blakes 7 was on he immediately walked out again.

When he thought the broadcast was over, he went into another bar where Blakes 7 had also been showing.

As if by teleportation, he appeared at the bar and the landlord remarked, ‘‘Blimey, that was quick’’.

In the late 1980s Thomas moved to the Scottish Borders with his third wife, Linda, who survives him, along with a son from his first marriage, Glyn, who is an English teacher. A daughter, Anna, predeceased him. Two previous marriages to Annie and Shelagh, a makeup artist, ended in divorce.

He enjoyed the tranquillity of rural living beside the River Tweed, reading, writing poetry, tending his rose garden and enjoying a few pints in the local pub.

This idyllic life was broken only by his commutes to London for acting work; he appeared as a fire brigade chief in the popular ITV series London’s Burning for three years.

The cast of Blakes 7 was reunited for the launch of the series on video in 1995, by which point Thomas had decided ‘‘not to bite the hand that feeds me’’. Having accepted that Blake was the role with which he would always be associated, he attended international fan conventions with good grace.

He would happily chat and drink with fans, known as ‘‘Blakies’’.

A jovial but gentle soul, Thomas occasionally got the worse for wear at these events and on one occasion was reported making comments about his virility, the less vulgar of which was his claim to have fathered 99 children. Thomas would delight Blakies at conventions by taking requests to perform the great speeches from Shakespeare’s plays.

It gave him great pleasure to know that many people who had never been to the theatre before came to see him in Shakespeare because of Blakes 7.

Thomas went to Rada, worked as an actor in provincial theatre and graduated to the West End and small roles on TV. The cast of Blakes 7 was reunited for the launch of the series on video in 1995, by which point Thomas had decided ‘‘not to bite the hand that feeds me’’.