Obituary: James Ellis, actor

Jimmy Ellis: Actor best known for his role in Z-Cars but who also forged a fine career on the stage

MANY associate James Ellis – always Jimmy – as the happy-go-lucky Constable Bert Lynch, or Z Victor One, in the BBC crimes series of the Sixties, Z-Cars. The series enjoyed a huge success and was a regular from 1962 to 1978. Ellis became a national figure with his teddy-boy haircut and strong Irish accent.

James Ellis was a pupil at Belfast’s Methodist College and won a Tyrone Guthrie Scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic, where contemporaries included Paul Eddington and Prunella Scales. He returned to Ireland to join Belfast Theatre Group, first as an actor and then in 1959 as the group’s director of productions.

He made an early impact on the Belfast theatre scene in The Playboy of the Western World and in 1958 was acknowledged when he attended that year’s Edinburgh Festival with Ulster Group Theatre to present the world premiere of The Bonfire by Gerald McLarnon. The play was about the traditional bonfires illuminated across Ulster every eve of 12 July and had attracted much controversy in Ireland before it opened in Edinburgh.

The strong cast included Harold Goldblatt, Ellis and Colin Blakely and was given a warm reception in the Lyceum Theatre, not least for the highly charged direction by Tyrone Guthrie.

The sensitive nature of the play had caused several resignations in the group and when Ellis took over he found himself at the centre of another political controversy as he had programmed The Bridge, a play that was promptly banned by the group’s board.

Ellis and the actors resigned and Ellis set up the Ulster Bridge Productions. He then produced The Bridge to enormous success. The play was seen both in Edinburgh and London.

In 1961, Ellis went to London and had a major break when he was cast as Dandy Jordan in the BBC TV production of Stewart Love’s Randy Dandy – a controversial play that the corporation warned might offend. But Ellis’s intense performance was well received and one critic wrote: “James Ellis was magnetic as the honest rebel.”

It certainly got his name known, not least when the BBC was casting its new, abrasive series, Z-Cars. In January 1962, Z-Cars with its catchy intro music hit the screens and the four cops in their Zephyr patrol cars become part of the nation’s culture: as did their boss, the short-tempered and cantankerous Inspector Barlow.

The BBC had a winner from the start. The first shot was in a cemetery, where a police officer had just been buried: this was no Dixon of Dock Green with aged constables benignly supervising old ladies and their dogs. Z-Cars was gritty, feisty and dealt with controversial and often unpleasant subjects. It was cutting-edge drama and the scripts involved investigating unattractive and unpleasant criminals. An early criminal with a black eye was the young Judi Dench.

In 1965, the characters of Barlow (Stratford Johns) and Watt (Frank Windsor) were given a spin off – Softly, Softly – but Ellis stayed with Z-Cars until its demise in 1978.

Ellis had to change the character over the years – not least because the BBC changed the format from 1967 to twice weekly and only lasting 30 minutes. But Lynch mellowed as he got promotion and Ellis injected some raw Irish humour that kept the character lively and interesting.

In the first series – set in fictional Newtown near Liverpool – the pressure on the actors was considerable. All the episodes went out live and this necessitated Ellis and his colleagues dashing from one pre-set-up studio to another and often having to rapidly change costumes.

After the final season of Z-Cars in 1978, Ellis returned to the theatre and was in the long running Once a Catholic in London’s West End and Hugh Leonard’s hilarious Da in Belfast.

He was still much in demand on television and appeared in Doctor Who, Ballykissangel, In Sickness And In Health and Only Fools and Horses.

A major television success came in 1982 when Ellis played the bullying father in Too Soon To Talk To Billy – the first of a trio of Graham Reid scripts focusing on working-class Ulster Protestants. It was Sir Kenneth Branagh’s first professional job and he was cast as Ellis’s son. Sir Kenneth, said yesterday: “Jimmy was a great inspiration to me, and many other actors from the north of Ireland. I was blessed to begin my career working with him, and I will never forget his generosity to me.”

Ellis suffered a personal tragedy when his 28-year-old son Adam was murdered in 1988 on the towpath by the Thames in Hammersmith.

Ellis, who died of a stroke, is survived by his second wife and two children.