Donald Hewlett

Donald Hewlett, right, as Colonel Reynolds with Windsor Davies in It Ain't Half Hot Mum. 

Donald Hewlett, who has died of pneumonia aged 90, was already in his mid-50s and had a long career as a screen character actor behind him when he was cast as Colonel Reynolds, commanding officer of a second world war Royal Artillery concert party, in It Ain't Half Hot Mum (1974-81). In public, he found people recognising not just his face, but also his voice.
While Battery Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) tried to instil discipline into Bombardier "Gloria" Beaumont (Melvyn Hayes), the singer Gunner "Lofty" Sugden (Don Estelle), the pianist "Lah-de-Dah" Gunner Graham and others, Colonel Reynolds enjoyed the easy life, lounging around, sipping gin and conducting an affair with Daphne Waddilove-Evans (Frances Bennett), whose husband was away in the Punjab.
While Battery Sergeant Major Williams (Windsor Davies) tried to instil discipline into Bombardier "Gloria" Beaumont (Melvyn Hayes), the singer Gunner "Lofty" Sugden (Don Estelle), the pianist "Lah-de-Dah" Gunner Graham and others, Colonel Reynolds enjoyed the easy life, lounging around, sipping gin and conducting an affair with Daphne Waddilove-Evans (Frances Bennett), whose husband was away in the Punjab.
The sitcom was written by the Dad's Army creators David Croft and Jimmy Perry. Perry himself had taken charge of a concert party while serving with the Royal Artillery during the war. Croft and Perry later gave Hewlett the role of Lord Meldrum in the "upstairs, downstairs" sitcom You Rang, M'Lord? (pilot 1988, series 1990-93). As head of an aristocratic, 1920s family, George Meldrum ran the Union Jack Rubber Company and was a respected member of the gentry – a position threatened by his extra-curricular activities with Lady Agatha Shawcross (Angela Scoular). It was often left to the butler, Alf Stokes (Paul Shane), to create diversions and cover up the relationship. Despite his wealth, the peer paid his staff badly.
Hewlett, who came from a wealthy family himself, was born in Northenden, Cheshire. His father, Thomas, owned the Anchor Chemical Company, based in the Manchester suburb of Clayton. Hewlett was 10 when his mother died. While attending Clifton college in Bristol, he started producing revues. Then, at Cambridge University, where he studied meteorology and geography, he was a member of the Footlights revue.
However, his course was curtailed by the outbreak of war, during which he served in the Navy as a meteorologist in Orkney – providing reports for Lord Mountbatten – and set up Kirkwall Arts Club in a temperance hall. He was later responsible for looking after Japanese prisoners-of-war in Singapore, where he organised entertainment for British troops.
After the war, Hewlett trained at Rada, winning the Athene Seyler award for comedy. He left it to his younger brother, Clyde – who was later made a life peer for his services to the Conservative party – to take over the family business. Hewlett started his professional career with the repertory company at Oxford Playhouse, where he soon became a leading man, acting alongside Christine Pollon, whom he married in 1947. He also helped to boost the career of Ronnie Barker, who was working for the theatre's publicity department. He got chatting to Barker after seeing him sticking up posters, and recommended him for a speaking role in the next production. In 1951, Hewlett and Barker – in costume – provided a local spectacle as they shared a pony-and-trap trip around Oxfordshire to promote a production of Charley's Aunt.
Hewlett also toured with the husband-and-wife team of Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert, and appeared in the West End musical Grab Me a Gondola (Lyric theatre, 1956-57) and the revue … And Another Thing (Fortune theatre, 1960).
He made his film debut, alongside Sid James, Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers, in the comedy Orders Are Orders (1954). Although Hewlett subsequently appeared in the school comedy Bottoms Up (starring Jimmy Edwards, 1960), most of his screen career was spent on television. He played Captain "Snooty" Pilkington, son of the retired army officer of the title, in the sitcom The Adventures of Brigadier Wellington-Bull (1959). He then appeared mostly in dramas, including episodes of The Saint (1965), The Avengers (1966) and Callan (1967), as well as the Dennis Potter plays Vote, Vote, Vote, for Nigel Barton (1965) and Message for Posterity (1967).
In a 1965 episode of Coronation Street, he was Bob Maxwell, a married solicitor who offered Elsie Tanner a lift, had a heart attack at the wheel and died. He also played Sir George Hardiman in the 1971 Doctor Who story The Claws of Axos. More comedies then came Hewlett's way, including the regular role of Colonel Sutcliffe in Now Look Here (starring Ronnie Corbett, 1971-73) and Carstairs in the shortlived Come Back Mrs Noah (pilot 1977, series 1978), written by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd.
Hewlett's last screen appearance was in a 1995 episode of the sitcom The Upper Hand. The following year, he took to the stage for the last time, alongside Ronnie Corbett, in the pantomime Mother Goose (Churchill theatre, Bromley). Epilepsy, caused by a damaged heart valve, led him to retire and he later developed Alzheimer's disease.
Hewlett's first marriage ended in divorce, as did his subsequent, 1956 marriage, to Diana Greenwood, a dressage rider. He is survived by his third wife, the actor Therese McMurray, whom he married in 1979, and their children, Patrick and Siobhan; and by two sons, Jonathan and Mark, and a daughter, Sophie, from his second marriage.

• Donald Marland Hewlett, actor, born 30 August 1920; died 4 June 20

Albertina Sisulu

Walter and Albertina Sisulu in 1994. 

When 20,000 women gathered outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria in 1956 to protest to the South African prime minister JG Strijdom against an extension to the pass laws, they sang: "Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock." They could have been describing Albertina Sisulu, wife of the ANC leader Walter Sisulu. Albertina, who has died aged 92, was quiet and unassuming, but her strength and resilience over a lifetime of persecution and hardship were extraordinary.
She was born Nontsikelelo Thethiwe in the village of Camama, in rural Transkei. Her happy childhood ended when she was 11 with the death of her father, a miner, probably from the lung disease pneumoconiosis. Her mother was always sickly and Albertina – as she was christened by the missionaries who educated her – looked after her three siblings. Twice she had to drop out of school, so she was two years behind the rest of the class when she graduated from Mariazell, a Catholic mission school, in 1939. She wanted to become a nun, but that would have made it difficult to support her family, so she opted for nursing.
In 1940, Albertina started work at the Johannesburg Non-European Hospital. She nursed with Nelson Mandela's first wife, Evelyn, and Walter Sisulu's sister, Barbie – and then she met Walter. He was instantly smitten and they married in 1944, with Mandela as best man. That year, Albertina was the only woman present at the formation of the African National Congress Youth League.
Albertina had been apolitical but soon she became subsumed in Walter's great passion. After April 1963, when he went underground to head the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), she became the breadwinner, supporting from her meagre nurse's salary their three sons, Max, Mlungisi, Zwelakhe, two daughters, Lindiwe and Nonkululeko, adopted children Gerald and Beryl, several nephews and nieces and, later, grandchildren. She insisted that their home in Soweto and its garden be immaculate and that every visitor be fed, no matter how little food there was.
Albertina simply carried on where Walter had left off after he and the rest of the ANC leadership were imprisoned at Robben Island in 1964. The state persecuted Albertina relentlessly. She was repeatedly arrested, sometimes under the Terrorism Act, which allowed detention without trial; sometimes on trumped-up charges. Banning orders meant she could not go to meetings or leave the district. One of the reasons given for her first banning order, in 1964, was that she had attended "a multiracial reception at the British consulate".
Max Sisulu's wife, Elinor, wrote in In Our Lifetime, a 2002 biography of her parents-in-law, that what Albertina found hardest to bear was the persecution of her children. Max was forced into exile aged 17. After repeated detentions and torture, Lindiwe fled to Britain via Swaziland, where she pursued doctoral studies at York University. Zwelakhe, a journalist, was detained, tortured and banned. Each detention caused Albertina dreadful anxiety, particularly after her nephew, Kenneth Sisulu, died in custody.
The brutal suppression of the student uprisings of 1976 recruited thousands for Umkhonto we Sizwe. Albertina organised for them to join training camps in neighbouring states. When the United Democratic Front, effectively the internal wing of the ANC, was launched in 1983, Ma Sisulu, as she was known, was elected one its three national presidents. But by that time, she was back in jail. She spent seven months in solitary confinement before being tried for promoting the ANC at a friend's funeral. She was sentenced to four years, two of which were suspended, but was released pending appeal and immediately resumed her political work. Two years later, she was arrested again and charged with treason. There were massive protests. International opinion had swung against apartheid. The state's case collapsed and she was freed again.
Albertina was regarded by many as the mother of the nation. But so was that other famous wife, Winnie Mandela. Albertina was intermittently horrified by Winnie's behaviour but, mindful of the state's desire to set the two women against each other, and the closeness of their husbands, refused to be drawn into public criticism of her. The murder in 1989 of Dr Abu Baker Asvat changed things.
Baker Asvat had set up a mobile clinic in a poor squatter community, and in the early 1980s Albertina went to work for him as his nurse. One day, he was asked to examine two youths sent to him by Winnie for evidence of sexual assault: she claimed to have rescued them from the clutches of a local cleric. Baker Asvat found no signs of assault, which did not please Winnie. Soon afterwards, he was shot in his surgery. Nothing was ever proved, but Albertina had serious misgivings about the circumstances of Baker Asvat's death. Later, in 1997, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated claims that Winnie Mandela had ordered his killing, Albertina was called to testify but gave no incriminating evidence.
In 1989, she was finally allowed a passport and went abroad for the first time. In the US, she was feted by George Bush Sr and in Britain met Margaret Thatcher. That October, Walter was released. The couple travelled extensively for the next few years, mostly on business. A second honeymoon was taken in a Black Sea dacha after an official visit to the Kremlin. After the first democratic elections in 1994, Albertina became an MP, her power base in women's organisations such as the ANC Women's League and the Federation of South African Women. The plight of women and children was her abiding concern.
Walter died in 2003; at his funeral, a poem written by Albertina, Walter, What Will I Do Without You?, was read out. After his death, she lived quietly in the family home in Linden, a Johannesburg suburb, but her children continue to play a prominent role in South African public life: Lindiwe is minister of defence and Max is speaker of the National Assembly.
Albertina is survived by her children, 26 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
• Albertina Sisulu (Nontsikelelo Thethiwe), nurse and ANC activist, born 21 October 1918; died 3 June 2011

Josephine Hart

Josephine Hart in 2001. Damage is to be reissued this year as a Virago Modern Classic.

Josephine Hart, who has died of cancer aged 69, was the author of the bestseller Damage (1990), a savage, shocking novel about passion and betrayal with the now famous line: "Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive." It was translated into 26 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide, and in 1992 was made into a film, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.
Josephine was also an evangelist for poetry and claimed that poets shaped her life. She was born and raised in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, in Ireland, one of seven children, and educated at a Catholic boarding school. "I was a word child in a country of word children, where life was language before it was anything else. Poets were not only heroes, they were indeed the gods of language."
To the packed-out audiences who flocked in recent years to the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library in London, she would explain that "poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gives voice to experience in a way that no other literary art form can". In Catching Life By the Throat (2006), the edited book of poems that came out of these evenings, she wrote: "Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable."
Josephine came to London when she was 22. She joined Haymarket Publishing and eventually became one of its directors. In the late 1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets group to read aloud the works of WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson et al, and she wanted leading actors for her "dead poets' society". Actors, and other artists, came in droves, first to Gallery Poets, later to her Poetry Hour: Juliet Stephenson, Edward Fox, Roger Moore, Harriet Walter, Bob Geldof, Harold Pinter, Eileen Atkins, Bono and Dominic West, to name but a handful.
TS Eliot was her favourite poet, and the production Let Us Go Then, You and I, a look at Eliot's life and works, which started off as a one-off event, turned into a six-week West End run – the first ever for a poetry programme – at the Lyric theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in 1987. She went on to produce a number of West End plays, including the award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca, Noël Coward's The Vortex and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. In 1989 she also presented the series Books By My Bedside for Thames TV, for which she interviewed subjects including Derek Jarman, Clare Short and Jackie Collins about their current reading material.
After Damage, which told the story of a politician's obsession with his son's girlfriend, she went on to write another five novels: Sin (1992), Oblivion (1995), The Stillest Day (1998), The Reconstructionist (2001) and The Truth About Love (2009). Damage and Sin are to be reissued as Virago Modern Classics later this year, and Josephine felt that was a thrilling tribute. She loved the cover we at Virago proposed for Damage – a red rose bristling with thorns – and immediately I received a large bouquet of red roses from her, with a line from Marianne Moore: "Your thorns are the best part of you."
Having been gripped by the British Library poetry performances – not least those from Josephine herself – Virago first published the edited poetry collections Catching Life By the Throat and Words that Burn (2008). The Truth About Love, the first novel of hers that I published at Virago, was the only one that Josephine set in Ireland. Like all her books, it is about passion, but this time, misplaced passion, she believed, for a mythology that asks its people to keep dying for country and cause.
It is also about redemption and hinted at her own personal tragedies. By the age of 17, Josephine had witnessed the deaths of three siblings. "I have never actually written about it in all these years," she recalled, "except elliptically in this book. It was an extraordinary thing to know that such things can be survived. What happened, to be very cold about it, in our family, was strange, but looking back on the history of mankind and going back to all the great literature and the Greeks, grief and loss is part of the human condition."
In 1984 Josephine married Maurice (now Lord) Saatchi, the advertising magnate and political adviser, with whom she had a son, Edward. She had another son, Adam, from her first marriage, to Paul Buckleigh.
To me, Josephine's belief that literature can make a difference was inspiring. Though she was hugely sophisticated and glamorous, and no stranger to the benefits of working a room and making connections, the fact that so many of us were willingly beguiled by her was because of her passionate belief in art. There was something elemental about her.
Her novels show that she was not afraid of big, unruly, raw – savage, even – feelings, the real stuff of human relations. But she was far from being serious and high-minded at all times. She teased, loved banter, had a great warmth and laughed easily. She gave the world a special appreciation – for poetry and for words – believing that words could make it all worthwhile. She was right, but no small part of that was because she was the one delivering them. Josephine is survived by her husband and sons.
• Josephine Hart, novelist and producer, born 1 March 1942; died 2 June 2011

Miriam Karlin

Miriam Karlin as Paddy in The Rag Trade. 'Everybody out' was her catchphrase.

The actor Miriam Karlin, who has died of cancer aged 85, became famous in the early 1960s as Paddy, the militant shop steward of a London clothing firm in the BBC television comedy series The Rag Trade. As Paddy, who was always willing to signal a strike with a whistle and her catchphrase "Everybody out!", Karlin was watched by millions, and quoted by millions. But neither that success, nor her more serious roles on stage, removed the gnawing dissatisfaction she felt at not achieving something more serious. She channelled some of that feeling into promoting broadly leftwing causes as a member of the council of the actors' union Equity, and as a campaigner for the Anti-Nazi League, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Soviet Jewry.
She was born Miriam Samuels and brought up in Hampstead, north London, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish barrister, Harry Samuels, and his wife, Céline. She revered her father, who specialised in industrial and trade union law. When she was doing one of her first radio shows, Terry-Thomas's Top of the Town, she based some of the zany characters she invented and played on people who had appeared before the rent tribunal chaired by her father.
Tall and dark, she admitted to being a "pain in the neck" as a child because she would always mimic her parents' guests. After attending South Hampstead high school and Rada, she called herself a "character comedian" and appeared at music halls, as well as touring with the Entertainments National Service Association during the second world war.
Karlin made her London stage debut in The Time of Your Life at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1946. She was later spotted by a BBC producer and, in 1950, joined Peter Sellers in the radio series Variety Bandbox, centred around a hotel called Blessem Hall. They played all the characters themselves. Among her creations were Mrs Bucket and Mrs Snitchlepuffle.
After appearing in revues at the Strand and Saville theatres, she played Mrs Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank at the Phoenix theatre in 1956. For two years she played Lilly Smith, the tart with the heart, in Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be (1959-60), one of London's most successful stage musicals, first at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and then at the Garrick in the West End. However, she left the cast because she felt she was getting worse, not better, in her role.
This was part of a recurring pattern of self-doubt. When The Rag Trade had been running for two years, Karlin said she would leave at the end of the second series, whatever inducements were made for her to stay. In 1962 the show made the leap – with her among the cast – to the London stage, where it flopped. However, she enjoyed her roles in a series of plays by Saul Bellow, which were staged in London in 1966. She played Golde (one of her favourite parts) in Fiddler On the Roof at Her Majesty's theatre in the West End in 1967 and took the title role in Mother Courage at the Palace theatre, Watford, in 1972.
Karlin had appeared in films since the early 1950s, taking small roles in Room at the Top (1959), The Entertainer (1960) and The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963). In 1971 she made a brief but memorable appearance in A Clockwork Orange as Catlady, who is attacked by the delinquent Alex with a phallic sculpture. In 1974 she was Aunt Rosa to Robert Powell's Mahler, in Ken Russell's biopic of the composer.
Having acquired the rights to the translated letters of Liselotte, the wife of Louis XIV's homosexual brother, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, she read from them in a one-woman show that she put on in the mid-70s. It was panned as thin and undramatic but, undeterred, she took it to Versailles, where the action was located, and to Vienna and Australia.
Karlin boasted that her artistic judgment was excellent, because every play she turned down flopped. Nevertheless, she grew more and more disssatisfied with her achievements, chiding herself, sometimes publicly, for not applying herself enough. In 1975 she was appointed OBE and, two years later, she returned to the role of Paddy in two series of The Rag Trade, still opposite Peter Jones as the hapless boss, Harold Fenner. This time it was broadcast by LWT, with less success than the original series.
The publication of her memoir, Some Sort of a Life, in 2007 revealed the full extent of her psychological and physical difficulties during this period. "Throughout my 50s the battle with my health, my weight and my addictions raged," she wrote. She had recurring back problems and peripheral neuropathy, which caused pain in her legs. She joined the Neuropathy Trust and wrote to Exit, the organisation offering advice for assisted suicide, to find out "how to depart if it got more than I could bear". Later, she was told she was in denial about her eating disorder.
None of this stopped her going on CND and miners' strike marches and refusing to pay her poll tax. When she played in The Witch of Edmonton for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1982, a letter containing five razor blades was delivered to her. The part also required her to be beaten by other members of the cast and, without padding, she was badly hurt. She told herself that she must be "really hated".
She continued to perform on stage in her 70s and appeared on primetime TV series such as Casualty, The Bill and Holby City. In 2006, while making a Miss Marple television episode, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, she was told that she had cancer and that part of her tongue would have to be removed. She worried what would happen to her if her speech was affected. But after the operation she appeared in the demanding film Children of Men (2006) as a German grandmother. In 2008 she was in Flashbacks of a Fool, starring Daniel Craig.
Karlin said that people concerned her most – supporting "the suppressed ... those minority groups who flee from home and country because they can't live with prejudice". She was unflagging in her work for such causes, but sometimes reflected sadly that she would not have had time for it had she married and had children, which she never did. She said that she had shied away from being tied down, and that in any case all the men she knew were actors, and she would never dream of marrying an actor.
Over the years, Karlin often contributed to the Guardian's letters pages, on matters ranging from the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to broadcasting and funding for the arts. In 2008, at a meeting at the Young Vic in London, she called for a vote of no confidence in proposed Arts Council England cuts. Throughout her career she did things, dramatically and as a political activist, which made her intensely nervous, the hallmark perhaps of a genuinely courageous and life-affirming spirit.
Michael Billington writes: My abiding memory of Miriam Karlin is of her passionate political convictions. If ever I wrote a piece attacking cuts in government subsidy or the problems confronting grant-starved drama students, she would send a vigorously supportive letter. Miriam didn't just talk a good political game. She was also fervently active.
She was a remarkably versatile actor and enjoyed a great year with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982, including a voracious aristocrat in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money and an earthy Mistress Quickly in the two parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV which opened the Barbican. I would have liked to have seen her in more classical roles but recall a beautiful performance she gave in Ellen McLaughlin's Tongue of the Bird at the Almeida in London in 1997, as a Polish-Jewish grandmother permeated by memories of loss and separation. Above all, Miriam ("Mim" to her friends) had a fighting spirit that marked her work, both on and off stage.

• Miriam Karlin (Miriam Samuels), actor, born 23 June 1925; died 3 June 2011

Mary Murphy

Hollywood actor who shot to fame as Marlon Brando's girlfriend in The Wild One

Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Their characters’ romance was doomed. 
Co-starring with Marlon Brando in his prime is a bonus for any actor's filmography. The fame of Mary Murphy, who has died aged 80, was boosted considerably when she played his love interest in The Wild One (1953). Tame by today's standards, it was the film in which the brooding, rebellious, black-leather-clad Brando, as the leader of a motorcycle gang, emerged fully as a sex symbol. The pretty, clean-cut Murphy, never considered a sex symbol herself, served as an excellent foil to Brando who, when asked what he is rebelling against, replies: "What've you got?" As the sheriff's daughter, she immediately attracts the attention of Brando when he comes in for a beer at the diner where she works. Gradually, the attraction becomes mutual as he rides his large, phallic motorcycle with her clutching his waist, her hair blowing wildly in the wind. Although their romance is doomed, her love for him is redemptive. Spared the dated 1950s slang ("crazy daddy-o"), Murphy perfectly portrays a "square" small-town girl whose suppressed restlessness is stirred by the forbidden encounter. Murphy was born in Washington DC, spent most of her early childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, and her teens in California. While working as a package wrapper at Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, without any thoughts of an acting career, the 18-year-old was spotted in a coffee shop by a talent scout for Paramount Pictures. While the studio put her through acting, singing and dancing classes, Murphy appeared in 11 Paramount films in bits or small parts, starting in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), starring Bob Hope. "I'll never forget that first picture," Murphy said, "nor the one line of dialogue I had in it. The line was, 'I'm sorry, I haven't got any change.'" She had a few more lines as Laurence Olivier's daughter in William Wyler's Carrie (1952). It was only after she left Paramount that Murphy began to get leading roles, her first being in MGM's Main Street to Broadway (1953). However, the flimsy central plot, featuring Murphy as an ambitious stage actor in love with an aspiring playwright (Tom Morton), was swamped by the film's gimmick of having almost every star then working on Broadway make "in person" appearances. Nevertheless, she managed to land the role in The Wild One in the same year. She found the film a learning experience because "Marlon didn't always stay precisely to the script – and that was something I had always done. He'd sort of change the sentence structure of a line, maybe add or edit out a word here or there. That forced me to really listen, because I never knew for sure what he was going to say next." Now in demand, Murphy went on to star in four films in 1954, none of them particularly challenging. Beachhead, a tale of jungle warfare in which she was a plucky French planter's daughter, making her way with US marine Tony Curtis through Japanese-held territory; The Mad Magician, in which she was the villainous Vincent Price's stage assistant; Make Haste to Live, as the daughter of a woman in peril; and Sitting Bull, as the wife of an American major (Dale Robertson) seeking peace with the Sioux. It was during the filming of Make Haste to Live that she and her brawny co-star Robertson became romantically involved. They married in 1956, but the marriage was annulled six months later because Murphy claimed her husband did not want children. Meanwhile, Murphy was kept busy in television, predominantly as a guest star in western series such as Wagon Train and Laramie, and in features, the most prestigious being Wyler's The Desperate Hours (1955), with Humphrey Bogart in gangster mode, threatening a middle-class family. Murphy, still young enough looking at 24 to play the spirited teenage daughter, is the object of desire of Bogart's depraved younger brother (played by Dewey Martin). Perhaps with The Wild One in mind, she was again cast as a teenager in Live Fast, Die Young (1958), billed as "the sin-steeped story of today's beat generation". Murphy's penultimate film role before retiring was as the bitchy sister-in-law of a rodeo rider (Steve McQueen) in Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner (1972). In 1962 Murphy married Alan Specht, the president of a chain of lighting stores. They divorced in 1967. Their daughter, Stephanie, survives her. • Mary Murphy, actor, born 26 January 1931; died 4 May 2011

Dyson Wilson

Dyson Wilson played eight games for England as a wing forward before turning to sustainable farming in the West Country

My friend Dyson Wilson, who has died aged 84, was a man of parts: a rugby international, fisher, farmer, writer and raconteur. Known as "Tug" Wilson, he played eight games for England at wing forward and was a member of the 1955 British Lions squad on its tour of South Africa. He was admired for his highly tactical approach to the game.
Dyson was born in South Africa and moved to Britain with his family when he was a child. He relocated to Salisbury (now Harare), then in Rhodesia, in the late 1950s. Among many adventures there, he ran two popular restaurants. In 1969, he and his second wife, Diana, and their two young sons, Mark and Hugh, moved to west Cornwall, where Dyson had family connections and where their daughter, Senara, was born.
For several years, Dyson part-owned and worked as a deckhand aboard the vessel Heather Armorel. During that time I had the good fortune of working with him. Dyson later sailed small yachts across the Atlantic and into the Pacific.
One Atlantic voyage with Diana and a friend, when Dyson was 73, nearly ended in disaster. Two weeks out of Brazil, on course for South Africa, they were dismasted and spent 38 days edging slowly south on a tiny jury-rigged sail, aiming with great precision for the island of Tristan da Cunha. They made it and, on the point of being driven ashore, were rescued by the islanders.
For many years, the Wilsons owned a small farm on the Lizard peninsula, where they lived by their beliefs in sustainability and humanist values. Dyson was buried in idyllic woodland on the farm. On his gravestone is inscribed the phrase that summed up his belief in what life could be like, if only humankind could get it right: "Heaven on Earth".
He is survived by Diana and their children; by two daughters, Aine and Christina, from his first marriage, to Ann; and by 10 grandchildren.

Madelyn Pugh

Television writer behind the enduring sitcom I Love Lucy

Madelyn Pugh on the set of I Love Lucy with the actors Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz 

Madelyn Pugh, who has died aged 90, carved out a place for herself in television history when she co-created, with Bob Carroll Jr, I Love Lucy, which began the comedy actor Lucille Ball's long-running small-screen career – and is widely regarded as the most successful programme of all time, still screened worldwide. Pugh and Carroll began as a writing partnership at CBS radio, where they scripted Ball's sitcom My Favorite Husband (1948-51). They also created a vaudeville act for the star to perform on stage with her new husband, the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz.
The slapstick and the "kookie" Lucy character from that act formed the basis of the subsequent television series (1951-57), which Pugh and Carroll devised with Jess Oppenheimer, the head writer and producer, who also transferred from the radio show. Ball played the stagestruck New York housewife Lucy Ricardo, whose husband, Ricky, was also a bandleader. In the next-door apartment were their landlords, Ethel and Fred Mertz (Vivian Vance and William Frawley), who acted as their comic foils.
Week in, week out, the "situation slapstick" included antics such as Lucy cramming her face and hat with chocolates, trampling a vat of grapes and setting fire to her nose – a false, putty one she was wearing as a disguise – when she lit a cigarette. Seeking ever more farcical situations, Pugh often tested the slapstick herself. "The worst one was trying out a unicycle," she recalled. "I ran into a wall and hit my head. We decided it was too dangerous."
With Carroll, Pugh went on to script episodes of the sequel series, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-60), and – following Ball's divorce from Arnaz – The Lucy Show (1962-68), Here's Lucy (1968-74) and the shortlived, disappointing comeback, Life With Lucy (1986). She also struck a blow for women in television at a time when few were working behind the scenes in creative roles and was named the Los Angeles Times's woman of the year in 1957.
Pugh was born in Indianopolis, Indiana, where her father worked in a bank's real estate department. She wrote a three-act play at the age of 10 and at Shortridge high school was an editor of the school newspaper. She graduated from Indiana University's school of journalism in 1942. After writing for newspapers in Indianapolis and continuity scripts for its radio station, WIRE, she moved to California and worked at NBC, then became a staff writer at CBS in 1944.
Pugh was teamed with Carroll for the first time on the radio sitcom The Couple Next Door, beginning a 50-year writing partnership. Then, they contributed to the comedian Steve Allen's sketch show It's a Great Life when it began on radio in 1948. "One time, we were reading a script at the table," she recalled of their working methods. "I felt that a joke could be funnier if we added a certain word. I wrote it in the margin of my script and I looked over, and Bob had written the same word. So we thought alike and thought the same things were funny."
Although they dated briefly, Pugh and Carroll settled for a working relationship. In addition to their success with Ball, they created the television sitcoms Those Whiting Girls (1955-57), about two sisters living at home with their mother in Los Angeles, The Tom Ewell Show (1960-61), starring the comedian as a real estate agent whose life is dominated by women, and The Mothers-in-Law (1967-69), with Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard.
The pair also contributed to programmes such as Sanford and Son (1975) and Alice (1977, 1985). They were less successful with their 1966 sitcom pilot for Carol Channing, which was not turned into a series. In 1992, Pugh and Carroll were presented with the Writers Guild of America's Laurel award for television writing achievement. Pugh's autobiography, Laughing With Lucy: My Life With America's Leading Lady of Comedy, was published in 2005.
Her 1955 marriage to the producer Quinn Martin ended in divorce. In 1964, she married Richard Davis, a doctor, who died in 2009. She is survived by Michael, the son of her first marriage.
• Madelyn Pugh, writer, born 15 March 1921; died 20 April 2011