obituary: Donald Hewlett, actor

Donald Hewlett found fame in his fifties - until then he had had a successful career on stage playing officers and titled gentry - when David Croft, the creator of Dad's Army, was casting his next sitcom, It Ain't Half Hot Mum. It was set around a wartime concert party of (all male) performers touring India and Burma. It gained huge audiences in 1974 and ran until 1981.

Croft has written about the casting of Colonel Charles Reynolds in It Ain't Half Hot Mum: "We were in little doubt about Donald Hewlett for the colonel. I knew him well and he had a delightful light touch with comedy." So was created one of the most endearing characters in the series. Reynolds was laid back and accepted the oddest of foibles amongst the entertainers and Hewlett clearly much enjoyed playing the character.

While Battery Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) tried to instil some Welsh discipline into the likes of Bombardier "Gloria" Beaumont (Melvyn Hayes) and the singer Gunner "Lofty" Sugden (Don Estelle), Colonel Reynolds enjoyed the easy life, lounging around, sipping gin and conducting an affair.

The show captured the fun of the days of music hall and Croft's script gave Hewlett ample opportunities to display his ability for comic timing.

Donald Hewlett came from a well-to-do family - they owned the Anchor Chemical Company - and he attended Clifton College in Bristol.

He read meteorology at Cambridge where he was much involved with the Footlights. When war interrupted his studies, he joined the Royal Navy and was sent to Orkney to file weather reports for the Admiralty, and especially for Lord Louis Mountbatten.

While stationed there, on HMS Sparrowhawk (the Hatston airfield), Hewlett was a founding member of the Kirkwall Arts Club, which was then based at the Naval Cinema in the Temperance Hall in Kirkwall, now the Orkney Arts Theatre.

In more recent years, Hewlett donated his papers detailing the founding of the club, along with many fascinating photographs, to its archives.

Hewlett was then sent to Singapore and, after being demobbed he went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began his acting career at the Oxford Playhouse.

He was one of the leads in the company but, typically, Hewlett gave a helping hand to a young man in the publicity department named Ronnie Barker. Hewlett ensured Barker was given a part in the next production, Charley's Aunt, and the two went on a publicity trip round Oxford - in costume - in a pony and trap.

Hewlett often came to Scotland in productions led by Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert and appeared in the successful West End musical Grab Me a Gondola in 1956.He worked in the movies - notably Orders Are Orders with Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers - but was more often on the small screen in dramas such as The Saint, The Avengers Callan and Dennis Potter's play Vote, Vote, Vote, for Nigel Barton. In 1965 he was in one episode of Coronation Street playing a solicitor who had a heart attack in a car after offering Elsie Tanner a lift. He also joined Ronnie Corbett in 1971 for Now Look Here.

He appeared in all eight series of It Ain't Half Hot Mum and made the vague Colonel Reynolds very much his own. It was not filmed in Burma but in the woods of Norfolk (with some added tropical plants and battered wooden huts) and on a training ground at Aldershot. While it was popular throughout its initial run, the BBC was reluctant to repeat the programme - which irritated Hewlett greatly. Many considered this was because a white actor (Michael Bates) had been cast as the Indian bearer.

He joined his friend Tom Conti in 1986 to make Saving Grace but Hewlett scored another major success when Croft cast him in You Rang M'Lord? The role of Lord Meldrum was specially written by Croft for Hewlett and he carefully never overdid the toffee-nosed aristocrat. From 1990 to 1993 Hewlett played the head of a family with a large estate who, once again, was carrying on a hot affair cunningly covered up by the butler (Paul Shane).

Hewlett made his last appearance on stage with his friend Ronnie Corbett in pantomime in 1996. The onset of epilepsy and later Alzheimer's disease caused his retirement.

His first marriage to Christina Pollon ended in divorce as did his second in to Diana Greenwood. He is survived by his third wife, Therese McMurray, who he married in 1979, and their son and daughter and by two sons and a daughter from his second marriage