Anton Rodgers | Television industry

Anton Rodgers

With his large, reliable face and portly but youthful demeanour, Anton Rodgers, who has died aged 74, was a watchable character actor and benevolently sensible man who mistrusted the more tinselly aspects of theatre and film.

He made two popular television series on themes which applied to his own life: older men with younger wives or lovers, and the vagaries of middle-aged marriage. In real life, Rodgers separated from his first wife and eventually married a woman 24 years his junior, echoing his role as the solicitor Alec Callender in the BBC-TV series May to December (1989-94), produced by Verity Lambert, who died last month. He was also the star of ITV's sitcom series Fresh Fields (1984-86), a surprise success which won an Emmy.

Rodgers was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the son of an accountant. As a boy at Westminster city school, he hoped to become a doctor. But his mother - a domineering woman who was a former singer and ran a dancing school - recruited him, at the age of five, into one of her charity singing and dancing shows and later put pressure on him to become an actor.

In 1947, aged 14, he had a walk-on part in Carmen at the Royal Opera House and in 1948 appeared as Pip in Great Expectations, in a touring production of the actor-manager Bransby Williams. After every final curtain call, Williams went back on stage to announce that in response to "numerous requests" he would now give impressions of other Dickens characters. The young Rodgers had to stay, building his mistrust of certain sorts of "actoriness".

He then played the title role in Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy in Birmingham. Rodgers wanted to go to university but was persuaded by his mother to go instead to the Italia Conti Academy and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts on a scholarship.

He had nearly died of pneumonia aged six months, and his health continued to be poor. Bad stomach pains started when he was 14 and he continued to suffer until he was 27, when he started bleeding badly from the mouth and had an operation to replace two-thirds of his stomach with plastic.

After Lamda, Rodgers did his national service as a Forces Network broadcaster, and when demobbed, he joined the chorus of Sandy Wilson's The Boyfriend in 1957. The Crooked Mile (1959) and the revue And Another Thing (1960) helped to establish his reputation as a reliable light performer, and were followed in 1962 by Twists at the Edinburgh festival, and a year later Pickwick in London.

His first decent cinema role was in the Boulting brothers' film, Rotten to the Core (1956), after Peter Sellers, perhaps wisely, had bowed out. The film was described as routine - unusually for the Boultings - despite a strong cast including Eric Sykes, Kenneth Griffith, Charlotte Rampling, Ian Bannen and Raymond Huntley. Rodgers claimed that he had never been more miserable in his life. He maintained that he had done the film so that his mother could think of him as a "film star". "After she died, I could get rid of all that rubbish," he said.

However, he went on to make many film appearances, including Crash Dive (1959), The Iron Maiden (1962), Carry on Jack (1963), The Day of the Jackal (1973), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) and Son of the Pink Panther (1993).

In the late 1960s and 70s, he became a respected director. In 1969, he created and directed We Who Are About To at the Hampstead Theatre Club, which in its revised form of Mixed Doubles went into the Comedy Theatre. In 1970 he directed The Fantasticks at Hampstead, and Roses of Eyam and The Taming of the Shrew at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter. Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman followed at the Oxford Playhouse in 1975 and Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been...? at the Bush Theatre, London, in 1977, and Flashpoint at the New End, Hampstead, and then the Mayfair in 1979.

As a stage actor, he thrived in Songbook, Waiting for Godot, John Osborne plays at the Royal Court, Mr Jingle in Pickwick on Broadway as well as in the West End, and a number of plays at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the 60s, including Heartbreak House, The Beaux Stratagem and The Italian Straw Hat, all three in 1967.

He appeared in the mid-1970s in a National Theatre production of The Front Page, in which he played Hildy Johnson on an Australian tour. But he did not appear at the National Theatre in London until 1984, when he was in Shaw's Saint Joan. More recently, he was seen on TV in Noah's Ark and Midsomer Murders and played Willie Whitelaw in Longford. He also played Grandpa Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Palladium in 2002.

Rodgers had two marriages and two families, who all remained on good terms. He was first married to Morna Watson, a former ballet dancer. They had a son and a daughter. He then married the actor Elizabeth Garvie, 24 years his junior, by whom he had three sons.

"I think I am actually a father - that's my real role," he said in 1986, soon after reflecting that things that mattered when you were 25, like success, didn't matter at all once you were 50 - a position that sat well with the bulky and avuncular character he often played.

· Anton Rodgers, actor, born January 10 1933; died December 1 2007

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