Jack Shepherd, the English actor perhaps best remembered for playing the title role in the 1990s ITV detective drama Wycliffe, has died at the age of 85.
The Leeds-born TV star passed away in hospital following a “short illness”, with his wife and children present, PA news agency reports.
“His passing is a sad loss to us all,” said his agents Markham, Froggatt and Irwin.
Awards he received include an Olivier for the original production of the stage play Glengarry Glen Ross in 1983.
He had an earlier television incarnation as Bill Brand in the 1970s ITV series of the same name about a fictional firebrand Labour MP.
Shepherd also had numerous film roles and was a playwright and theatre director.
After school in Leeds, he won a scholarship to Newcastle University to study fine art, then moved to London to study at The Central School for Speech and Drama.
He went on to perform in the National Theatre and Royal Court theatre
For his breakthrough TV role as Bill Brand, he won a Bafta nomination in the best actor category in 1977.
The show was described in a Spectator tribute last year as a “time capsule of the 1970s – the brown everywhere, the fag-smoke and lunchtime beer, the patterned wallpaper, the rusty Ford Cortinas and sense of national decay”.
The character Shepherd portrays is described as “part of a long tradition, reminding the Left of the principles it has wandered from in the search for power”.
As the thoughtful Det Supt Charles Wycliffe, Shepherd solved murders in Cornwall over 36 episodes between 1993 and 1998.
His work as an actor in productions ranged from a schoolteacher in Play for Today: Pidgeon – Hawk Or Dove? (1974) to a barrister in Blind Justice (1988), and from the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn in the docudrama Beethoven (2005) to an Auschwitz inmate in the drama God on Trial (2008).
Shepherd directed The Two Gentlemen Of Verona in 1996 at Shakespeare’s Globe and the production also went to Broadway.
He worked with director Bill Bryden on numerous theatre productions and was also a saxophonist and jazz pianist.
Jack Shepherd is survived by his wife Ann Scott and five children Jan, Jake, Victoria, Catherine and Ben.