Jack Shepherd, the English actor best remembered for playing the title role in the 1990s ITV detective drama Wycliffe, has died aged 85.
The Leeds-born TV star died in hospital with his wife and children by his side after a “short illness”, the PA news agency reports.
His agents Markham, Froggatt & Irwin said, “His passing is a tragic loss to us all.”
Awards he has received include an Olivier for the original production of the stage play Glengarry Glen Ross in 1983.
His first television incarnation was as Bill Brand in the ITV series of the same name about a fictional firebrand Labor MP in the 1970s.
Shepherd also had several film roles and was a playwright and theater director.
After school in Leeds, he won a scholarship to Newcastle University to study Fine Arts, then moved to London to study at The Central School for Speech and Drama.
He performed at the National Theater and the Royal Court Theater
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 – brownness everywhere, fag-smoke and lunchtime beer, patterned wallpaper, rusty Ford Cortinas and a sense of national decay”.
The character portrayed by Shepherd has been described as “part of a long tradition of reminding the left of the principles it has strayed from in its pursuit of power”.
As thoughtful detective Charles Wycliffe, Shepherd solved murders in Cornwall in 36 episodes between 1993 and 1998.
His work as an actor in BBC productions ranged from a school teacher in Play for Today: Pigeon – Hawk or Dove? (1974) to a barrister in Blind Justice (1988), and from Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn in the BBC docudrama Beethoven (2005) to an Auschwitz prisoner in the drama God on Trial (2008).
Shepherd directed The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe in 1996, and the production also went to Broadway.
He worked with director Bill Bryden in several theater productions and was also a saxophonist and jazz pianist.
Jack Shepherd is survived by his wife Ann Scott and five children Jan, Jake, Victoria, Katherine and Ben.
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