Longtime Coro Street star’s personal life had echoes of his on-screen character

Johnny Briggs, the actor who has died aged 85, was already a well-known face in films and on television when he made his debut in 1976 in ITV’s epic soap Coronation Street as the crafty Cockney wide boy Mike Baldwin.

Although Granada producers had made it a rule to use only artists unfamiliar to the viewing public, like Violet Carson (who played Ena Sharples), Briggs was an exception. Not only had he become a fixture on television and in films, he had also appeared on stage at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which was still regarded as a nursery for new talent.

Briggs believed he fitted in at Coronation

Street ‘‘because I was playing a sort of outsider anyway. Being a

Londoner, a factory boss, everyone expected Mike to be a bit flash,’’ he explained. ‘‘It probably added to the image rather than detracted from it.’’

But his abiding passion was golf. Such was Briggs’ obsession with the game that his first wife remembered him missing the birth of his first child in 1965. ‘‘He couldn’t even be bothered to come to the hospital,’’ she said. ‘‘He was out on the course.’’

Seven years older than the character he played, Briggs first appeared in Coronation Street in 1974 as a van driver, and was asked back two years later to play Mike Baldwin and to join the regular cast. He was offered a threemonth contract, during which he was to have an on-screen affair with Bet Lynch (Julie Goodyear).

His confrontations with his love rival, Ken Barlow (played by William Roache), became a regular feature of the storyline, and observers believed there was something of Mike Baldwin in Briggs. The character had four marriages and countless affairs, including flings with Barlow’s wife and daughter.

When Ken Barlow was reunited with his wife Deirdre (Anne Kirkbride) following her affair with Baldwin, the announcement ‘‘Ken and Deirdre reunited. Ken 1 – Mike 0’’ was flashed up on the Old Trafford scoreboard during Manchester United’s game against Arsenal that evening.

Much ink was spilt in Fleet Street over the years chronicling Briggs’ personal life. In the mid-1990s, when he was 59, he had a six-month affair with a 21-year-old air hostess. In 2007, aged 72, he was caught by a British tabloid ‘‘romping’’ with a prostitute in Thailand, and he went on to have a relationship with a make-up artist more than 40 years his junior.

Briggs left Coronation Street in 2006, after 30 years in the show. During his time at Granada he had developed a reputation as a ‘‘corpser’’, who laughed so much during recording that he was reprimanded not only by the director but by other members of the cast and occasionally by the crew.

John Ernest Briggs was born in 1935 at Lavender Hill, Battersea, south London, the son of a master carpenter and the elder of two children. Evacuated during World War II to Guildford, he later went to live with a family at Winsford in Cheshire, and sang as a boy soprano in the local church choir.

In 1947, aged 12, he won a scholarship to the Italia Conti stage academy. Having immediately landed a role as a boy soprano with the Italian Opera Company in London, Johnny made his professional stage debut the same year and went on to appear in several operas including Tosca, Falstaff and Rigoletto.

On joining one company he was told by another boy that it was customary to greet visiting opera singers in their native language. Briggs confidently addressed the lead soprano with what he thought was a welcome, but she fled in tears. Later he discovered that he had actually been taught to say: ‘‘Why don’t you f... off?’’ in perfect Italian.

When his voice broke in 1949 he appeared on stage with Audrey Hepburn in Sauce Tartare. The year before, he had appeared in his first film, Quartet, starring George Cole and scripted by Somerset Maugham. More work soon followed: in 1953 he played Skinny in Britain’s first X-rated film, Cosh Boy,

featuring the starlet Joan Collins.

Having presented himself as a homosexual in order to avoid National Service – he failed – Briggs spent two years in the Royal Tank Regiment, as a driving instructor and then a gunner. His biggest problem was his size: at 5ft 6in Briggs was almost too small for the regulation uniform. There were no boots small enough for his size five feet, and he spent his time as a tank-driving instructor wearing slip-ons.

After his discharge in 1955, he made his stage comeback with the High Wycombe repertory company, playing a range of roles in such stage favourites as Dial M For Murder, Boeing-Boeing, Wait Until Dark and Doctor In The House.

During the 1950s Briggs became a peripheral member of a group of harddrinking actors led by Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole. Briggs noted that while he drank halves of bitter, Harris and Burton were drinking double gins.

In 1960 he appeared with John Thaw in Granada’s drama series The Younger Generation, and continued to be in demand on the big screen, with roles in such films as Sink The Bismarck and Doctor in Love, as well as comedies including The Bulldog Breed with Norman Wisdom, The Intelligence Men with Morecambe and Wise, and three Carry On

films.

During the 1960s his television roles became more frequent, with parts in Z Cars, Softly Softly, Love Thy Neighbour, The Avengers, The Saint and Danger Man.

Asked what he liked about his alter ego Baldwin, Briggs replied: ‘‘I like his approach to life, his approach to women. He doesn’t start affairs, he lets them come to him. If they don’t, then he’s really not at all bothered. He’s a very confident and basically a nice guy.’’

Briggs’ ghostwritten autobiography was published in 1998. Despite receiving more amorous fan mail than any other actor in the cast, he claimed he had ‘‘no illusions about showbiz’’ and that he saw himself as a jobbing actor. ‘‘I go to work,’’ he said, ‘‘get the job done, get paid and go home.’’

After his retirement from Coronation Street

in 2006, Briggs received the British Soap Award for Lifetime Achievement and was appointed MBE. He made a few subsequent appearances, in shows including Holby City.

He married, in 1961, Caroline Sinclair, with whom he had a son and a daughter. After his divorce in 1975 he married Christine Allsop, a teacher, with whom he had two sons and two daughters. This marriage, too, was dissolved. His children survive him.

He saw himself as a jobbing actor. ‘‘I go to work, get the job done, get paid and go home.’’