Gareth Hunt

Gambit, the smooth action-man hero of 'The New Avengers'

 

Published: 15 March 2007 independent

Alan Leonard Hunt (Gareth Hunt), actor: born London 7 February 1943; three times married (three sons); died Redhill, Surrey 13 March 2007.

 

Gareth Hunt found fame worldwide as the action man Mike Gambit in The New Avengers. With the revival of the quintessential 1960s British spy series a decade after the original, a lithe male sidekick was needed for Patrick Macnee's bowler-hatted, brolly-twirling Steed, who was by then in his mid-fifties. Gambit, a former major in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, performed that function while Joanna Lumley as Purdey performed high-kicks in skirts.

 

It was the high point of Hunt's career. "When I stopped playing Gambit," he said, "everybody saw me as Mr Smoothie, which is an image that is a million miles away from me. Then I did the Nescafé ads, so for 10 years I was known as the coffee man."

 

Hunt's own early life was every bit as varied. Born in Battersea, south London, in 1943, he left school at the age of 15 and served in the Merchant Navy for six years. On returning to Britain, he took a string of jobs, before enrolling for a BBC design course, then deciding to try acting as a career. He trained at the Webber Douglas Academy and gained experience in repertory theatre around Britain, before performing at the Royal Court Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre.

 

After bit-parts in the sitcoms For the Love of Ada (1972) and Bless This House (1974), and the Doctor Who story "Planet of the Spiders" (1974), Hunt landed his first regular television role as the footman Frederick in the popular ITV Edwardian costume-drama serial Upstairs Downstairs (1974-75), which followed the lives of the upper-class Bellamy family and their "below stairs" servants.

 

He was then catapulted from the rank of supporting player to one of the stars when Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell, producers of The Avengers, were approached by a French company with the idea of reviving the sophisticated and stylish espionage series that had been one of the 1960s' great telefantasy productions.

 

The original star, Patrick Macnee, returned, playing the gentleman undercover agent John Steed, with Joanna Lumley filling the action-girl role previously taken successively by Honor Blackman, Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson. But Macnee was getting too old to be involved in much physical action, so Hunt was drafted in to play Gambit.

 

"Originally, I didn't see my character the way I was asked to play him," he said:

 

I'm totally different to Patrick. He went to Eton, while I was born on the wrong side of the Thames, so I thought Gambit should be less smooth. Besides which, it's very difficult diving through windows and fighting people in a three-piece suit. Still, it was wonderful to get one's suits made at Savile Row.

 

With both French and Canadian backing, The New Avengers enjoyed location filming in Britain and those countries over two series and 26 episodes (1976-77). But the programme never attained the success of the original and its greatest legacy was probably the much-copied page-boy haircut donned by Joanna Lumley as Purdey.

 

Although the programme had given Hunt international recognition, he subsequently found screen roles hard to come by and took parts in second-rate films such as The World is Full of Married Men (as a well-dressed south London wide-boy, 1979) and the horror spoof Bloodbath at the House of Death (starring Kenny Everett, 1984).

 

A short-lived starring role came in the sitcom That Beryl Marston . . .! (1981), made by Southern Television shortly before it lost its ITV franchise. Hunt acted Gerry Bodley, a well-heeled company executive steering the road to divorce from his wife, Georgie, a Brighton curiosity-shop owner (played by Julia McKenzie). Only their friends Harvey and Phil (Peter John and Jonathon Morris), a gay couple who ran a health-food store, kept them from coming to blows, but the nail was finally hammered into the coffin by Gerry's affair with "the sex goddess of East Sussex", Beryl Marston, who was never seen on screen.

 

It was more than 10 years before Hunt landed another regular screen role, again in a sitcom. In Side by Side (1992-93), he played the happily married Vince Tulley, who ran a successful plumbing business but proved a thorn in the side of his newly widowed snooty neighbour Gilly Bell (Louisa Rix), with his DIY projects and home improvements such as a Grecian acropolis built in his Kingston-upon-Thames garden.

 

Another fallow period followed for Hunt, until soap opera beckoned. He briefly played the mobster Richie Stringer in EastEnders (2001), which put him at the centre of a "Who shot Phil Mitchell?" whodunit, but Phil's former lover, Lisa Shaw, was eventually revealed to be responsible for the near-fatal shooting of Albert Square's hard man.

 

Hunt then took a regular role as the four-times-married former merchant navy seaman Charlie Doyle in ITV's Night & Day (2001-02). As landlord of the Nautilus pub in Greenwich, south-east London, Doyle tried to settle down in the area where he grew up.

 

During his screen career, Hunt also stepped into period costume for the television films A Hazard of Hearts (1987) and The Lady and the Highwayman (1989), and in the cinema was seen in A Chorus of Disapproval (1988) and as a police inspector in both Fierce Creatures (1997) and Parting Shots (1998). He also played a crooked businessman in an episode of Minder (1982).

 

Anthony Hayward

 

I didn't know this!

I remember him from a coffee advert that was infamous at the time because when he shook his hand full of coffee beans it was like the sign language for w***er. Also, he was cockney rhyming slang well before James Blunt ever came along.

 

RIP