Geoff Hinsliff, who has died aged 86, was an actor best known on television for his role in Coronation Street as Don Brennan, a mild-mannered cab driver turned gambler, love cheat, kidnapper, attempted murderer and arsonist. Don’s life ended prematurely when he drove his car into a viaduct – and, in the middle of all this, he was in a turbulent marriage to Ivy, a devout Catholic struggling to get over the deaths of her first husband, Bert Tilsley, and son, Brian.
Hinsliff took the part after a quarter of a century playing character roles on screen and treading the boards in classical parts at the Old Vic theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
But he also had a supporting role on television that had already made him a familiar face – in the first series of the sitcom Brass (1983-84) as the forelock-tugging George Fairchild gratefully working for the ruthless mill owner, Bradley Hardacre (played by Timothy West), unaware that his wife is having an affair with his boss. Yorkshire-born, he loved the way it sent up so many assumptions and cliches about northern working-class life.
When the Granada Television producer Bill Podmore, responsible for this send-up of “trouble at t’ mill” dramas, created by John Stevenson and Julian Roach, returned to Coronation Street and was determined to launch Ivy (Lynne Perrie) into a second marriage, he cast Hinsliff as Don, the widowed, cheerful cabby driving Ivy and her friend Vera Duckworth (Liz Dawn) to a nightclub to celebrate Vera’s birthday in 1987.
Hinsliff, concerned at committing to a long-term acting part, took a while to accept the offer when told that Podmore planned wedding bells. Once he did, the Leeds-born actor rejected the idea that Don should be Irish, feeling a “fake accent” would backfire.
A summer 1988 wedding followed, with Hinsliff surprised at the speed of courtship and lack of apparent warmth between Don and Ivy on screen. “Lynne was for a very romantic relationship,” Hinsliff told Daran Little, author of The Coronation Street Story: Celebrating Thirty-Five Years of the Street. “She was for screen lovers and, frankly, I thought they were far too old for screen lovers. I saw them as Darby and Joan, a relationship based on companionship, not sex.”
Nevertheless, the marriage was happy for a few years, until the couple were torn apart by Ivy’s fuming at his gambling – he lost his cab to Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs) in a poker game – and her uncompromising views, particularly on the funeral of her son in 1989 (she wanted Brian buried as a Catholic with a mass, while his wife, Gail, played by Helen Worth, did not).
Don had an affair and, on being dumped, tried to kill himself by crashing his car on a country lane. It left him with his lower left leg amputated and, when Ivy turned to drink, he returned to her, but as two people living separate lives. He then became obsessed with the hairdresser Denise Osbourne (Denise Black), making obscene phone calls and leading Ivy to head off to a religious retreat, where she died of a stroke.
A bad business deal when Don bought the garage from Baldwin in 1996 sent him on a downward spiral. A year later he sought revenge, setting Mike’s factory alight, then kidnapping his wife, Alma (Amanda Barrie), and driving her into the River Irwell, although both survived. Later he took Mike’s car keys and tried to run over the factory boss, missing and crashing into the viaduct and perishing in a ball of flames.
Hinsliff was the second-youngest of four sons and one daughter born to Ethel (nee Jones), a tailor, and Frank Hinsliff, an engineering factory foreman. At the age of 15 he left Middleton secondary modern school – where an English teacher encouraged him to act – to work as a trainee window dresser in a Leeds department store. He also performed as an amateur with the Leeds Service of Youth Players.
After national service with the Royal Army Pay Corps, Hinsliff won a scholarship to Rada. He graduated in 1960 and went straight to the Old Vic to take on a small role in Franco Zeffirelli’s breathtaking production of Romeo and Juliet, starring John Stride and Judi Dench. He continued at the Old Vic to play Vintner in Henry IV, Part 1, and Gasparo in The White Devil (both 1961).
Other small parts followed with the RSC at the Aldwych, London (1964-65), including one in Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of Marat/Sade (1964). Hinsliff worked with another celebrated director, Lindsay Anderson, both on stage as the scrum half Brian Copley in David Storey’s play The Changing Room (Royal Court, 1971) and in the film O Lucky Man! (1973).
His television debut came as a Roman soldier in the nine-part Shakespeare cycle The Spread of the Eagle (1963). Hinsliff was then prolific on the small screen in everything from Z Cars (two roles, 1963 and 1975) and A Family at War (as a corporal, 1970) to I, Claudius (as Rufrius, 1976) and Doctor Who (two roles, 1977 and 1979).
He took two parts in Coronation Street before playing Don. In 1963, he was Jerry Booth’s cycling friend Vincent, rejected by Jerry’s fiancee Myra to be his best man. Then, in 1977, he played Eric Bailey, who with his friend Les Fox conned Renee Bradshaw and Bet Lynch into accepting a double date away from the street, failed to turn up and stole alcohol from the corner shop.
In 1990 Hinsliff had a break from Coronation Street to star in the BBC radio drama September Song as the standup comedian Billy Balsam. His rare film appearances included playing a wireless operator in A Bridge Too Far (1977).
In 1967 Hinsliff married Judy Seal. She and their daughters, Gaby and Sophie, survive him, along with four grandchildren, Matt, Jude, Reuben and Freddie, and a brother, Ken.
• Geoffrey Hinsliff, actor, born 23 November 1937; died 15 September 2024
