Trevor Howard

Decency with something twitching underneath it: that was Trevor Howard's contribution to British film. Born Trevor Wallace Howard-Smith in Kent in 1913, he trained at RADA and worked on the London stage through the 1930s before Brief Encounter made him a star in 1945. BFI Screenonline described what he brought as a new kind of male lead for British cinema, steady, middle class and reassuring, but capable of suggesting neurosis under the tweed. Four years later he was Major Calloway in The Third Man, the tired professional who is right about everything and enjoys none of it.

The leading man phase was short. From the 1960s he became the character actor international productions reached for whenever they needed authority with a crack in it. He is Captain Bligh in the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, playing the role as a man convinced of his own reasonableness rather than as a monster. He is Lord Cardigan in The Charge of the Light Brigade, Father Collins in Ryan's Daughter, Richard Wagner in Ludwig, the Abbe Faria in The Count of Monte-Cristo, and a detective superintendent in Sidney Lumet's The Offence. He won a BAFTA for a leading performance and a Primetime Emmy for a television film.

The late work is a warning about being reliable. He turns up as the 1st Elder in Superman, Judge Broomfield in Gandhi, and in a long line of films that did not deserve him, including Meteor and Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is good in almost all of them anyway. He died in 1988.