Jack Stanley Watling, actor: born Chingford, Essex 13 January 1923; married 1946 Patricia Hicks (one son, two daughters, one stepdaughter, and one son deceased); died Chelmsford, Essex 22 May 2001.

As the all-time loser Don Henderson in the popular 1960s aircraft- factory drama The Plane Makers and its sequel, The Power Game, Jack Watling found a strong television role to follow several decades in the cinema, where he was typecast as a light leading man.

However, on the big screen, he had shown some versatility by switching from war dramas to thrillers and comedy. He was memorable as an airman battling to gain his wings in Journey Together and a man given the task of spending a million pounds in 60 days in Three on a Spree, effortlessly moving on from one film to another, in the best tradition of British character actors.

Born in Chingford, Essex, in 1923, Watling set his sights on the stage after appearing in Scout shows and trained at the Italia Conti Stage Academy. He made his professional début at the age of 12 when the school mounted a production of Where the Rainbow Ends at the Holborn Empire (1935).

Just three years later, he made his film début with an uncredited bit-part in Sixty Glorious Years (1938). He also had small roles in both The Housemaster (1938) and Goodbye Mr Chips! (1939) before the Second World War broke out. Although he took a secretarial course at Clark’s College, in Chingford, to give himself a career to fall back on, his youth and the absence of other actors, who were involved in the war effort, meant that Watling was in demand.

He joined the actor-manager Donald Wolfit’s company for a season at Cambridge (1940), made his West End début as Bill Hopkins in Once a Crook (New Theatre, 1941) and followed it by playing George Perrey, the role previously taken by Thorley Walters, in Cottage to Let (Wyndham’s, 1941) and Flight-Lieutenant Graham in Flare Path (Apollo, 1942).

On screen, he was cast mostly as servicemen in war dramas such as Ships with Wings (1941), The Day Will Dawn (1942), We Dive at Dawn (1943), The Way Ahead (1944) and Journey Together (1945), in which he and Richard Attenborough were airmen struggling through their flight training. Watling also appeared in the propaganda picture The Young Mr Pitt (1942), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1941) and the satirical comedy The Demi-Paradise (1943).

After serving in the RAF himself for three years (1943-46), he built on this acting experience to establish his name. His next prominent screen role was in The Winslow Boy (1948), based on Terence Rattigan’s play, as Dickie Winslow, who enjoys the publicity when his family attempt to prove the innocence of his younger brother, expelled from the Navy for allegedly stealing a postal order. He had previously appeared in the stage version, at the Lyric Theatre (1946).

Although he became typecast in films as a character actor and in light leading roles, Watling switched easily between thrillers and comedy. In the satirical Meet Mr Lucifer (1953, starring Stanley Holloway and based on the actor-writer Arnold Ridley’s play Beggar My Neighbour), Watling and Peggy Cummins played a young married couple, just two of many people whom Stanley Holloway, as the Devil King in a provincial pantomime, tries to “rescue” from the relatively new medium of television, which he believes is making them too happy.

Later, in the comedy Three on a Spree (1961), a variation on the novel, play and previous films entitled Brewster’s Millions, Watling starred as Michael Brewster, who has to spend a million pounds in order to get eight million.

Such roles never put Watling at the forefront of British film stars, but his versatility enabled him to notch up more than 50 pictures during his career. His others included the upstairs-downstairs Victorian romantic drama The Courtneys of Curzon Street (1947), Alfred Hitchock’s less-than-successful costume epic Under Capricorn (1949), the Douglas Bader biopic Reach for the Sky (1956), The Admirable Crichton (1957) and the Second World War naval drama Sink the Bismarck! (1959).

On television, Watling had already appeared in The Invisible Man (1958), Danger Man (1960), Anna Karenina (1961) and Ghost Squad (1963), when he landed the role of Don Henderson, sales director at the Scott Furlong aviation factory, in The Plane Makers (1963-65). The dramas both on the factory floor and in the boardroom were a big hit with viewers, even more so after the series was retitled The Power Game (1965-66, 1969) and concentrated solely on the executives, led by the ruthless tycoon John Wilder (Patrick Wymark).

As in the cinema, Watling later switched to comedy. He took the part of a duke living close to the happy-go-lucky vagrant (Hugh Lloyd) who inherits a title, a country estate and a fortune in the writer Michael Pertwee’s ITV series Lord Tramp (1977). Then, he played Dr Carmichael, one of three elderly GPs making way for new blood in the form of two young women, in Doctor’s Daughters (1981), which was written by Richard Gordon and Ralph Thomas, and began life as a pilot the previous year.

His guest roles on television included the Yeti-seeking Professor Travers in the Doctor Who stories “The Abominable Snowmen” (1967) and “The Web of Fear” (1968), Sir Desmond Hooper in Fortunes of War (1987), an earl in Jeeves and Wooster (1990) and a colonel in Heartbeat (1994).

Watling cited his proudest achievement as saving Frinton Summer Theatre when, in 1974, it faced closure. With his own money, he mounted a season at the Essex seaside resort where he and his family had holidayed for many years and this enabled it to survive until new funding was forthcoming.

Watling was married to the actress Patricia Hicks. His stepdaughter is the actress Dilys Watling. His daughter Deborah (who played his daughter on television in The Newcomers) and son Giles also followed him into acting. Another son, Adam, was killed in a fall of snow in 1952, a year after his birth.

Anthony Hayward

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