Farewell to Gerald Harper 1929-2025

 Gerald Harper, the actor whose death in July at the age of 96 got very little press attention, had been retired for many years but is surely recalled with affection and admiration by many.
  Harper was by far the best Sherlock Holmes ever, and seemed born for the part, which he played at the Haymarket Theatre in 1979. A brilliant actor, almost absurdly handsome, in his starring roles on TV he came to epitomize a certain sort of Britishness. Like it or loathe it, you have to admit that he did it outstandingly well, particularly in Hadleigh, in which he played James Hadleigh, a Yorkshire landowner and businessman with a taste for equestrian sports. The YTV series ran and ran in the early seventies, and watching it now (which you still can on YouTube) is more than just a nostalgia binge. Originally featuring in the pilot series Gazette, Hadleigh was meant to be a rather dislikeable toff, whose interference in the provincial newspaper he happens to own caused resentment and friction. Played by Harper, he became so popular that YTV made him the titular hero of the new series.

  A James Bond without the ludicrous gadgets, gimmicks, bungee jumps and compulsive womanising, a Mr Darcy without the ludicrous pomposity, he brought a powerful presence to role. 

   In one scene of Gazette, Hadleigh, standing in a theatre bar, pronounces, "Shaw must be played with panache." Well, nobody could play a line with more panache than Gerald Harper could, particularly when he adopted that gravelly, ironic drawl.

  A sort of comedy in which he excelled was in portraying a man who is fending off the unwanted advances of a predatory woman. Scriptwriters put in a lot of scenes like this as it became his signature.

 Despite his TV success, Harper never gave up his stage career and appeared as a disturbingly convincing Iago at the Bristol Old Vic in 1974. 

    In 1984, he performed in a one-man show as Rudyard Kipling - again epitomizing something very British. It was unforgettable. He was an icon of Britishness. Only about twenty years ago, he was still doing a solo show, one man holding an audience spellbound for two hours.

  Harper appeared at the Oxford Playhouse more than once, in The Aspern Papers in 1979 and then in 2008 when he played the judge in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. On that occasion, he candidly told the local press that he had only ever done television work in order to make himself famous, so that he could get leading roles on the stage, which was his real love. 

   When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, the one luxury he chose was a set of videos of a five-day Test Match. Alas, such things are now disappearing fast in favour of one-day smash-and-run cricket.

   Amazingly versatile, he became the host of a series of radio shows, on Capital Radio, LBC and even Radio Oxford. For this he had to modify his gravelly, autocratic voice into a calm, reassuring, golden tone.

  Two very interesting things about him that few people know or would have guessed are, that he wrote a book of poetry, Gerald Harper in Love, which I am happy to say I own, and that his latter years he seems to have converted to Russian Orthodoxy. There were Russian Orthodox priests at his funeral. Clearly there were hidden depths to this man.

https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2365388.television-adventurer-solving-riddles/