The actor Ray Brooks, who has died aged 86 after suffering from dementia, will be remembered by many television viewers for his mop of curly hair as he enjoyed a string of comedy successes in the 1980s and 90s. Later, switching to soap with EastEnders, he played Pauline Fowler’s second husband, Joe Macer, who killed Pauline in a Christmas Day row in 2006 that ended with him hitting her over the head with a frying pan.
But Brooks had made an indelible mark on screen early in his career in two productions that captured contrasting sides of the swinging 60s. First came a starring role in the 1965 film comedy The Knack … and How to Get It, as Tolen, the sharp-dressing womaniser who tutors his fellow lodger, Colin (played by Michael Crawford), a shy teacher, in the art of seduction, with Rita Tushingham as Nancy, their guinea pig. The New York Times described Brooks as “the ultimate in cool, with his dark suit, dark glasses, hipster haircut, droopy eyelids and disrobing voice”.
The director Richard Lester’s “new wave” style helped to make The Knack, based on Ann Jellicoe’s stage play, a landmark film of the 60s featuring fast-moving visual gags intercut with documentary-like asides from an older generation deploring the collapse of public morals.
It won the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes film festival. Brooks was collected from his London flat by a Rolls-Royce at the start of a journey that ended at the Carlton Cannes hotel. “Every big star of the day you can think of was there and anything we wanted we just signed for it,” he recalled. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Glamour was replaced by social realism when Brooks was suggested to Ken Loach – another pioneering director who shot documentary-style – and cast as Reg, the husband of Carol White’s title character, in Cathy Come Home, based on a story by Jeremy Sandford. This 1966 Wednesday Play on BBC television was an uncompromising attack on council house waiting lists and the policy of separating husbands from their homeless wives and children.
Twelve million viewers watched the story of Reg losing his lorry-driver’s job, plunging his family into a downward spiral of poverty. Public and political outrage followed, and councils changed their rules on separating couples. Industry professionals later voted it the best television drama of the 20th century in a British Film Institute poll.
But Brooks’s career failed to soar as he might have expected. In an interview in 2010, he said: “I don’t think I was ever that good an actor. I was more an image of a young man. I was never as good looking as, say, my contemporary, David Hemmings. And don’t forget this was the period of Terence Stamp. So there was a lot of competition.”
He kept working, popping up as a character actor, mostly in television dramas, and building up a profitable career as a voiceover artist on commercials for products such as Flora, Whiskas, Marmite and R White’s lemonade.
Brooks also narrated the fondly remembered BBC cartoon series Mr Benn (1971-72), adapted by David McKee from his own children’s books about a bowler-hatted man taken on adventures via a fez-wearing fancy-dress shop owner. Only 13 episodes were made, although they were repeated for more than 20 years – but Brooks earned nothing on top of his original fee.
His television acting career was revived when he landed the role of a no-hope gambler, Robby Box, the poker-playing boyfriend of Jan Oliver (Sharon Duce), in the comedy-drama Big Deal (1984-86). He followed it by playing Max Wild, who walks out on his wife and grown-up daughter as he faces a midlife crisis, in the sitcom Running Wild (1987-89).
Less successful was Roy Clarke’s comedy-drama The World of Eddie Weary (1990), with Brooks as Alex Conway, an actor playing a private detective in a TV programme. A series never followed the pilot episode.
But he was back to winning ways as Tom Hollingsworth in the sitcom Growing Pains (1992-93), teamed again with Duce, this time with the pair as a middle-aged couple becoming foster parents. They had previously played the same parts in a BBC radio version (1989-90).
Another fallow period ended when Brooks enthusiastically accepted the role of the widowed Joe in EastEnders (2005-07). But he was soon disillusioned with what he later called the “shabby sets and poor scripts” and “lack of rehearsal time”. Wendy Richard, who played Pauline Fowler, complained about the producers’ plans for her character’s marriage to Joe. After they went ahead, Richard resigned and was written out of the soap. Pauline’s death was followed weeks later by Joe’s, in a fall from a first-floor window. It was Brooks’s last screen role.
Brooks was born in Brighton, East Sussex, to a single mother, Adelaide Roach, who worked as a bus conductor. She later told him that his father was called John Brooks and lived with a wife and two children just a short distance away. His mother went on to marry three times as Ray grew up. She introduced her son to the arts, taking him to see films in the town’s cinemas and concerts at the Brighton Dome, and sent him for elocution lessons.
He acted in local amateur dramatics and, on leaving Xaverian college, a Roman Catholic school, worked in the wages office for a bus company. In 1956, aged 17, he joined Nottingham Playhouse as an assistant stage manager and made his acting debut there, with two lines as John Hunter in a production that year of Treasure Island.
Brooks’s early television parts included Lucius, Brutus’s servant, in Julius Caesar (1960), Terry Mills, training as a driver with a cab owner played by Sid James, in the sitcom Taxi! (1963-64) and Norman Phillips (1963-64), who replaced Dennis Tanner as an agency’s talent scout, in Coronation Street.
In films, he appeared alongside Billy Fury in the pop musical Play It Cool and Alec Guinness and Dirk Bogarde in HMS Defiant (both 1962), as well as playing one of three teenage tearaways in Some People the same year. He also played a resistance fighter tackling Doctor Who’s enemies in Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966) and a Spanish waiter in Carry On Abroad (1972).
While slipping below star billing on TV, he found some compensation on the West End stage in the 70s and, at the National Theatre in 1981, he was acclaimed for his role as Weinberl in Tom Stoppard’s farce On the Razzle. He was a regular Jackanory storyteller on TV from 1969 to 1979 and wrote an autobiography titled Learning My Lines: From Cathy Come Home to EastEnders (2009).
In 1963, Brooks married Sadie Elcombe (nee Markins). She and their sons, Will and Tom, survive him. Their daughter, Emma, died in 2003.
• Raymond Michael Brooks, actor, born 20 April 1939; died 9 August 2025
