R.I.P. Conrad Phillips

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Conrad Phillips obituary

Stage and screen actor best known for his role in the ITV series William Tell



by Anthony Hayward London Guardian

Wednesday 13 January 2016 13.31 EST Last modified on Wednesday 13 January 2016 15.49 EST

One of ITV’s first action heroes, notable for his expertise with a crossbow, was William Tell, played by Conrad Phillips, who has died aged 90. Swashbucklers were hugely popular in ITV’s early years and William Tell (1958-59), set in 14th-century Switzerland under the tyrannical rule of Emperor Rudolph of Austria, was one of the most memorable series.

In the opening episode, Phillips, as the patriot who rebels against Austrian rule, was seen demonstrating his perfect marksmanship by shooting an arrow into an apple placed on the head of his screen son, Walter, by order of the hated governor, Landburgher Gessler ( Willoughby Goddard). Over the 39 episodes of the series, the bulky, blustering Gessler plotted to catch Tell, who operated from the hills with a band of outlaws.

William Tell was screened around the world and made a household name of Phillips, who performed many of his own stunts – which left him with a broken ankle, torn ligaments and a scar on his right shoulder from a wound inflicted during a sword fight. Serious injuries to his knees meant that he had to undergo replacement surgery when he was in his 60s. The programme was also notable for its theme song, based on Rossini’s William Tell Overture, with lyrics by Harold Purcell.

Son of Winifred (nee Keeley) and Horace Havord, he was born Conrad Philip Havord in London. His, father, a journalist, became a best-selling author of detective stories, taking his son’s forenames to create his pseudonym, Conrad Phillips – the name he advised his son also to adopt on going into acting. The young Havord attended St John’s Bowyer school, Clapham, then took jobs in the aviation and insurance industries before, at 17, lying about his age to join the Royal Navy as an able seaman. He saw second world war action in the Atlantic, North Sea and Mediterranean and survived the mining of a landing craft off the Greek coast. In 1945, he was invalided out with tuberculosis.

As Conrad Phillips, he then trained at Rada. While there, he made his stage debut, in Vice Versa, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1946-47), and appeared as the Third Gentleman Dancer in the premiere of Seán O’Casey’s Oak Leaves and Lavender (Lyric theatre, Hammersmith, 1947). On leaving drama school, Phillips landed the starring role in his first film, the smuggling drama The Gentlemen Go By (1948), followed by the part of the gardener in the Fodor play The Vigil on the West End stage (Prince of Wales theatre, 1948).

He then worked in repertory theatre, and acted in more than 30 films, including The Battle of the River Plate (1956), Sons and Lovers (1960) and Heavens Above! (1963). Phillips was often cast as police officers and military types.

The role of Tell came after the actor made guest appearances in other swashbuckling television series, such as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1956), The Count of Monte Cristo (1956), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1957) and The Buccaneers (1957). Apart from the detectives he played in the crime dramas Silent Evidence (1962) and A Game of Murder (1966), most of his subsequent television roles were one-offs. However, Phillips had runs as Robert Malcolm in the final year of the BBC soap opera The Newcomers (1969) and the NY Estates managing director Christopher Meadows in Emmerdale Farm (on and off between 1981 and 1986).

Throughout this time, Phillips regularly took stage work. He was in the Anthony Creighton-Bernard Miller play Tomorrow – With Pictures (Duke of York’s theatre, 1960) and performed with the English National Opera at the Coliseum, as Pasha Selim in Mozart’s Seraglio and the narrator of Stravinsky’s Oedipus.

In 1972, Phillips bought a hill farm in south-west Scotland and ran it for six years while continuing to take television roles. Among these was an episode of Fawlty Towers (1975) as Mr Lloyd, one of a group of wedding guests staying at the hotel: John Cleese as the puritanical Basil Fawlty so completely misreads the warm exchanges between family members and friends that at one point he tells Mr Lloyd to leave. However, with two young children to bring up, Phillips found the farm to be a rather isolated location, so he moved to Wiltshire – first Lacock, then Chippenham.

After guest-starring as the Swiss folk hero’s mentor, Stefan, in the William Tell television remake Crossbow *(1987-88), shot in France, Phillips bought a barn in Normandy and converted it into a house. He made his final screen appearance in a 1991 episode of the sitcom Never the Twain, centred around the rival antique dealers played by Donald Sinden and Windsor Davies.

Phillips’s marriage to Jean Moir, a fellow student at Rada, in 1949, ended in divorce. Their son, Patrick, died in 1982.

He is survived by his second wife, Jennie Slatter, whom he married in 1968, their two daughters, Kate and Sarah, and two grandchildren, Alice and Leo.

• Conrad Phillips (Conrad Philip Havord), actor, born 13 April 1925; died 13 January 2016