Bryan Marshall
Actor who specialised in coiffed heroes and shady public figures
BRYAN MARSHALL, the actor who has died aged 81, was instantly recognisable for his roles in two films – as a submarine commander in The Spy Who Loved Me and a shady politician in The Long Good Friday; but, having been a fixture on British television for nearly two decades, in the early 1980s he upped sticks for Australia.
With his coiffed hair and male-model looks he specialised in conveying decency and reliability in parts such as the captain of HMS Hero in the 1976 season of BBC TV’S naval series Warship; Commander Talbot in the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me the next year; and the hero-pilot “Tony Blair” in the BBC One air-cargo drama Buccaneer (1980).
He was more interesting, though, when suggesting tight-jawed corruption beneath the smooth surface – with characters such as Hallam, the policeman on the take in the bleak 1978 revenge serial Out starring Tom Bell. Hallam plays a crucial role – under duress – in helping Bell’s character to identify the snitch who got him eight years in prison.
In The Spy Who Loved Me, Marshall’s Commander Talbot is in charge of a Royal Navy nuclear sub that is swallowed up by a supertanker controlled by the Captain Nemo-like baddie, Stromberg. We see Talbot peering through the periscope and spluttering the words: “Oh – my – God.” A grenade kills him during the climactic scene. His face became familiar to millions through endless television repeats.
The biggest role of Marshall’s screen career was that of Harris, the city councillor dealing with the IRA while in the pocket of Bob Hoskins’s combustible gangster in The Long Good Friday (1980).
By 1983, feeling “stale”, as he put it, he transplanted his family to Australia from their home at Chalfont St Giles near Pinewood Studios.
He soon established himself once again, enjoying the more relaxed Australian approach to acting. Seen in Britain were his stints in Neighbours, Home and Away, and as a creepy psychiatrist in Prisoner: Cell Block H. For a year he lent his authoritative tones to the hosting of Australia’s Most Wanted.
Bryan Marshall was born into a working-class family in Battersea on May 19 1938.
After Salesian College, a Roman Catholic grammar school, he worked as an Olivetti salesman, before deciding to exploit his flair for acting just as kitchensink realism was capturing the public imagination. He won a scholarship in 1961 to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and from there joined Bristol Old Vic for a season.
In 1965 he was cast in his first recurring television role, as the captain of “Brentwich United” football club in the BBC’S twiceweekly soap opera United!
In 1968 he played a police detective in the ITV gangland drama Spindoe starring Ray Mcanally. Then he took substantial roles in a flurry of BBC costume dramas that exploited the possibilities of colour television – Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dr Bretton in Villette and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion
– as well as in the primetime shows of the era (The Forsyte Saga, Z Cars, Crown Court, The Saint, Softly, Softly, The Onedin Line et al).
On stage he won favourable notices in 1973 for his Petruchio opposite Prunella Scales in Richard Eyre’s The Taming of the Shrew at the Nottingham Playhouse.
His big-screen credits included the Anglo-dutch film titled The Rape for its British release in 1976; he played the Amsterdam detective Van der Valk from Nicolas Freeling’s novels. The respected Sunday Telegraph critic Tom Hutchinson praised Marshall’s “restrained, yet powerful” performance.
Marshall, who sometimes came back to Britain for work (Heartbeat, Dalziel and Pascoe), was highly regarded by fellow actors. His advice to a young Jason Connery was: “Just have fun.”
He is survived by his wife Vicki and their three sons.