The actor Tony Adams, who has died aged 84 after suffering from a heart condition, was best known for roles in two ITV soap operas. He played Dr Neville Bywaters in General Hospital for its entire seven-year run (1972-79) before joining Crossroads as the womanising accountant Adam Chance (1978-88), described by one critic as “an intriguing hybrid of love rat and lounge lizard”.
General Hospital began as a twice-weekly afternoon serial before switching to a weekly peak-time slot in 1975. As a smooth-talking consultant paediatrician at the fictional Midland General, Adams set female hearts a-flutter both on screen – eventually marrying a doctor – and off.
When filming finished in 1978, he was asked to play a similarly suave character in the Midlands motel soap Crossroads, which had begun in 1964 and was hated by TV critics but loved by viewers.
Adam Chance rose from financial adviser to assistant manager while notching up a string of love conquests. After an on-off romance, he married Jill Harvey (played by Jane Rossington), daughter of the motel’s owner, Meg Richardson, the matriarch played by Noele Gordon, who was sacked in 1981. Crossroads itself was taken off air seven years later.
Adams was close to Gordon, jokingly addressing her as “Miss Gordon” while she called him “Adams” as if he were her butler. The relationship was faithfully recreated in the 2023 ITV drama Nolly, written by Russell T Davies, with Helena Bonham Carter as Gordon and Augustus Prew as Adams, who himself had a cameo role. In 1985, he gave the eulogy at Gordon’s funeral.
When ITV made a failed attempt to revive Crossroads (2001-03), Adams reprised his character, by then a wine supplier – eventually killed in a fire.
Away from TV, the actor’s love of sailing reflected the adventures of his intrepid mother, Win (Winifred) Brown, who in 1930 had been the first woman to win the King’s Cup round-England air race. Her celebrity status led Win to tour theatres regaling audiences with tales of flying while sitting on stage in her cockpit. She also excelled at hockey, ice hockey and golf, went on to explore the Amazon by ship and canoe, and travelled by yacht to the Arctic with her long-time partner, Ron Adams.
On a sailing trip to Norway, she met Einar Sverdrup, a mining engineer. Flirtatious letters led to romance when Sverdrup visited Britain in 1939, and other affairs followed. During the second world war, Win and Ron lived on the Welsh isle of Anglesey, in Beaumaris, where Tony was born. Months earlier, the couple had married, but Win later told her son that his father was Dunny (Dunstan) Walker – one of the crew of her yacht. Win and Ron divorced in 1947.
Influenced by her own brief stint on the stage, she suggested in 1950, when Tony was nine – slightly unruly and a fluent Welsh speaker – that he consider an acting career. He attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London, where his training over five years included dancing.
While there, he appeared on stage in 1952 alongside Kenneth Williams in Italia Conti’s annual production of Peter Pan at the Scala theatre and did a 1953 season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon before playing Crispian, one of the orphans, in that year’s Royal Festival Hall Christmas production of Where the Rainbow Ends.
He first acted in front of the cameras in the star-studded 1951 film The Magic Box, although his contribution ended up on the cutting-room floor. However, he was seen in small roles in The Reluctant Bride (made in 1952 but not released until 1955) and Touch and Go (1955), and – as Anthony Adams – starring on children’s TV as Bill Banks in the 1953 Christmas play The Enchanted Garret. He was also heard on BBC radio in roles that included Roger, one of the gang of boys, in Lord of the Flies (1955).
During his early days as an adult actor, Adams regularly had morning coffee with the osteopath Stephen Ward, a neighbour in Devonshire Mews, London. He told Win’s biographer, Geoff Meggitt, that he was at Ward’s flat once when Christine Keeler was there and Ward, on the phone to a friend, said to her: “He wants to know what you’d like for Christmas.” She replied: “An abortion.” It was a comment later used in court as evidence that Ward, who became embroiled in the 1963 Profumo affair, was an abortionist.
Adams’s career through the 1960s was consumed by theatre, including two year-long runs in West End musicals, as Tony in The Boy Friend (Comedy theatre, 1967-68) and the older Patrick Dennis in Mame (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1969-70).
General Hospital gave Adams his television breakthrough and he made other small-screen appearances before Crossroads came along. When he played the oil refinery PR man Elgin, alongside Jon Pertwee’s Time Lord, in the 1973 Doctor Who adventure The Green Death, he was unable to complete the final two episodes of the six-part story after falling ill with peritonitis.
Following the end of Crossroads’ original run, Adams had only a handful of TV roles, in series such as Bergerac (in 1989) and the sitcoms The Upper Hand (in 1992) and The Grimleys (in 2001). Later, he was in a 2006 episode of Doctors.
His biggest theatre role post-Crossroads was as Grandpa Potts in the musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium (2004-05) and on a subsequent tour.
In 1974, with an inheritance of £17,000 from his father, Dunny, and earning good money in General Hospital, Adams bought Seaway, a 17-metre motor yacht that became his home on England’s south coast for many years. He also ran a yacht charter business.
Win lived with him on Seaway until shortly before her death in 1984. In 2020 he married Christine Everson, and she survives him.
• Anthony Sawley Adams, actor, born 11 December 1940; died 25 October 2025
