Dana Wynter

Actor often cast as an 'English rose', she starred in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956. 
It could be argued that the strikingly beautiful, dark-haired Dana Wynter, who has died aged 79, did not have the film career she deserved. One of the reasons may have been that she was under a seven-year contract to 20th Century Fox, a studio that gave her few chances to display her histrionic talents. As proof, Wynter's best film, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), was produced by Allied Artists, one of the "Poverty Row" studios. Nevertheless, it was Fox that made the demure Wynter into a star, featuring her in five rather hollow, self-important CinemaScope pictures. Some of her own frustration with her image is implied in D-Day: The Sixth of June (1956) when, as a British Red Cross worker, she tells a married American army captain with whom she is romantically involved: "You think I'm pure and angel-like because I'm English, my voice is crisp and my father's a brigadier. But I'm not pure and angel-like." Unfortunately, Wynter rarely had an opportunity to prove it. Perhaps that is what makes the ending of Invasion of the Body Snatchers so chilling – as the doctor (Kevin McCarthy) suddenly realises that Wynter, as the woman he loves, has turned into an inhuman pod person. Wynter, the epitome of the "English rose", was born Dagmar Winter, in Berlin, where her father, a celebrated surgeon, and her Hungarian mother were living at the time. She went to school in England and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and studied medicine at Rhodes University in South Africa. But after a year, she dropped her medical studies and returned to England, determined to take up acting. Credited as Dagmar Wynter, she appeared in bit parts in British films, and in two European-made Hollywood productions: The Crimson Pirate (1952) and Knights of the Round Table (1953). In 1953, aged 22, having gained an American agent, Wynter arrived in New York, where she immediately got work on television, prior to taking up her Fox contract in Hollywood. The studio first cast the unknown as a southern belle in The View from Pompey's Head (aka Secret Interlude, 1955), in which her beauty, rather than her acting, attracted notice. Playing an adulterous woman, Wynter found it hard to live up to the publicity: "Not since Scarlett and Jezebel has the south produced such a woman!" With a slight German accent and her hair lightened, Wynter was quite touching as a displaced woman in postwar Berlin who falls in love with an American army officer (Mel Ferrer) in Fräulein (1958). She gave a glimpse of what she was emotionally capable of in the same year's In Love and War, as a self-styled "rich tramp" who drinks and attempts suicide when abandoned by her soldier fiance (Bradford Dillman). Wynter's Fox contract ended with the British-made Sink the Bismarck! (1960), in which she played a briskly efficient Wren who helps to slightly loosen Kenneth More's stiff upper lip, by lending him a sympathetic ear. She was little more than decorative as Rock Hudson's white settler fiancee in MGM's Mau-Mau drama Something of Value (1957); as a daughter of a politician kidnapped by the IRA in Shake Hands With the Devil (1959); and as Lady Jocelyn Bruttenholm in John Huston's gimmicky whodunnit The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). The latter two films were shot in Ireland, where Wynter and her husband, Greg Bautzer, a divorce lawyer to many a Hollywood star, made their second home. They later divorced. Wynter played another aristocrat, this time opposite Danny Kaye, in On the Double (1961); she was bounty hunter Glenn Ford's wife in Santee (1973), her only western; and airport manager Burt Lancaster's neglected wife in Airport (1970), the film that initiated a cycle of disaster movies. After a relatively small role as Yves Montand's rich American wife in Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Le Sauvage (Call Me Savage, 1975), Wynter concentrated her energies on television, a medium in which she felt more comfortable and where expectations were lower. She had already made an impact as the wife of a double agent in 18 episodes of the series The Man Who Never Was (1966-67) and as a guest star in other shows. It was perhaps inevitable, given her list of uppercrust roles, that Wynter should portray Queen Elizabeth in the indigestible made-for-TV movie, The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982). In the mid-1980s, she took up journalism and wrote the column Grassroots, about life in California and County Wicklow, for the Guardian. She is survived by her son, Mark. • Dana Wynter (Dagmar Winter), actor, born 8 June 1931; died 5 May 2011

Edward Stobart

He reinvented the image of the road haulage business

Edward Stobart in 2000. 
He insisted his vehicles should always be immaculately clean.
They celebrated his business with pop songs, a fanclub of tens of thousands, souvenirs from Corgi toys to oil paintings, and there were cartoons and television series about his huge, lumbering juggernauts. Yet Edward Stobart, who has died aged 56 after suffering heart problems, was the antithesis of a big, brash, Yorkie-bar trucker. A small, neat, self-effacing man, with a pronounced stammer, he had a vision of an ultra-reliable operator with smart and disciplined drivers, working to tight margins that enabled him to transform a handful of lorries doing local fertiliser runs into a 1,000-vehicle logistics business by the time he sold Eddie Stobart Ltd in 2004. He was born at Hesket Newmarket, near Carlisle, the third child of EP "Steady Eddie" Stobart and his wife, Nora. His father, a lay preacher, started an agricultural supplies business in 1957, selling fertiliser equipment and acquiring lorries to do so, later adding a farm shop. The young Edward – always called that to differentiate him from his father – showed his commercial savvy in his teens by buying railway sleepers and cutting them up to sell for firewood. He left school at 15 to join his father's business, where he took a particular interest in the haulage side. Six years later, when his father divided the business, Edward took the lorries and the Eddie Stobart name, and soon relocated with eight vehicles to Carlisle. Stobart was obsessive about the business, driving trucks at night after working in the office all day. He insisted his vehicles should always be immaculately clean and introduced uniforms for his drivers, first green overalls and then collars and ties. "The tie wasn't the important thing about the uniform," he said. "It was the discipline." It was part of his vision. "Transport had had a shifty image for a long time. The average truck driver or small operator was basically a tramp. Service in the industry needed to be upgraded, so we put in standards which others are now following." He recognised the excitement shared by young children and their fathers for large shiny vehicles. Stobart gave his lorries girls' names – the first four were Twiggy, Tammy (Wynette), Dolly (Parton) and Suzi (Quatro). Later, one would even be named after William Hague's wife, Ffion. He instructed his drivers to hoot back when other vehicles waved. As the fleet grew, families played the game of counting the number they spotted and chorused "Eddie Stobart" to the tune of the Hallelujah chorus. The fanclub's key giveaway was a list of the complete fleet, and on offer was the opportunity to pick the name for a new truck. "The secret," said Stobart, "is never to have an empty truck. If you take lemonade down somewhere, bring water back up." He specialised in major contracts for big manufacturers and retail chains, particularly food and drink, taking advantage of computerisation and the huge expansion of road haulage at the expense of rail in the 1980s and 90s. From eight vehicles in 1975, he moved to 35 by 1980 and 540 in 1987, when he opened his first Midlands depot. By 2000, he was turning over £135m with 800 trucks. He and his brother William were estimated by the Rich List to be worth £60m. But his expansion was too rapid, and in 2001 the firm recorded its first loss. Three years later, Edward sold his 55% stake to WA Developments, where William was a partner. The new bosses successfully rebuilt the business so that it now has more than 1,500 trucks. Edward moved south from Carlisle to Warwickshire. His marriage to Sylvia, once the company secretary, with whom he had adopted four children, had come to an end, and he had a new partner, Mandy, who became his second wife, and with whom he had two children. He turned to constructing vehicles, starting up an agricultural vehicle business, Stratford Commercial Vehicles, which built horse-boxes. In 2009 he lost almost £1m on the ill-advised purchase of the failing commercial vehicle business Boalloy Fastruck Bodies, and last year he was banned for 20 months for drink-driving. Stobart is survived by Mandy, his children and his parents, two brothers and a sister. • Edward Stobart, haulage contractor, born 21 November 1954; died 31 March 2011

Trevor Bannister

Actor known for his role as Mr Lucas in Are You Being Served?

Trevor Bannister, third left, and the cast of Are You Being Served?
The actor Trevor Bannister, who has died of a heart attack aged 76, was best known to television viewers from his role in Are You Being Served? as Mr Lucas, the menswear assistant at the Grace Brothers department store. The character was conceived by the sitcom's creators, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, as one of the linchpins in the ensemble cast, creating a link between the menswear and ladieswear departments through his constant chasing of the stereotypical dollybird Miss Brahms (Wendy Richard). Bannister was also adept at portraying Mr Lucas as a rebel who frequently questioned the store's management policies – such as requiring staff to smile more – and made fun of the pecking order, in which he stood at the bottom. He served as a mouthpiece for Lloyd, who had himself sold menswear at Simpson Piccadilly, in central London, but kept his views to himself – although Lloyd was eventually fired for selling soft drinks from a fitting room during a heatwave. Mr Lucas began as the junior menswear member of staff when Are You Being Served? was launched as a 1972 episode in the BBC's Comedy Playhouse slot, before it was turned into a series the following year. In 1979, he was promoted to assistant when the camp Mr Humphries (John Inman) became senior in the department. Bannister did not appear in the final three series, pulling out in 1980 after the BBC refused to change the programme's recording day to allow him to continue in a long-running stage tour. He starred in the show's 1977 film spinoff, but was not approached to reprise the role of Mr Lucas in the 1990s television sequel, Grace and Favour. By then, he had firmly put Are You Being Served? behind him, saying: "I've done an awful lot of things since then and I did an awful lot of things before then. That was just eight years of bits and pieces in my life. I don't hang my hat on that." Bannister was born in Durrington, Wiltshire. His father was a tobacconist and newsagent. He attended the private Modern school, in Salisbury, leaving at the age of 15 to join a repertory theatre company in Folkestone. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and, after two years' national service in the army, gained further repertory experience in Torquay, Bath, Bedford, Worthing, Wolverhampton, York and Birmingham. He made his London West End debut as Arthur Crabtree in Billy Liar (Cambridge theatre, 1960) and later acted on stage in the farce Move Over Mrs Markham (Vaudeville theatre, 1969), Funny Money (Playhouse, 1995) and a revival of The Odd Couple (Theatre Royal Haymarket, 1996). After making his film debut in Reach for the Sky (1956), Bannister's screen appearances were almost exclusively on television. He starred as Peter Barry in the children's sci-fi series Object Z (1965) and Object Z Returns (1966), before his breakthrough role as the titular spiv in The War of Darkie Pilbeam (1968), the popular trilogy about a 1940s black marketeer, written by the Coronation Street creator Tony Warren. He was then cast as the refuse collector Heavy Breathing in all three series of the Granada sitcom The Dustbinmen (1969-70), written by Jack Rosenthal, whose gutter language tested the patience of the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse. After Are You Being Served?, Bannister played the ladykiller and burglar-alarm dealer Peter Pitt, who joins a group run by Brian Wilde's retired army major and Neighbourhood Watch founder, in the sitcom Wyatt's Watchdogs (1988). He also took three roles in Coronation Street, appearing first as Harry Lester (1967), then as Ritchie Levitt (1972) and finally as Mike Baldwin's solicitor (2006). From 2001, he enjoyed making guest appearances in Last of the Summer Wine as the golfclub captain Toby, becoming a regular for the final two series (2009-10). Throughout his career, Bannister was a regular pantomime dame on stage, taking 34 roles in 35 years, and always supplying his own wigs, moulded to his head. In 1959, Bannister married the actor Kathleen Cravos, from whom he was later divorced. He is survived by their three sons, Simon, Timothy and Jeremy, and by his second wife, Pam Carson, whom he married in 1982. Two of his sons followed him into show business: Simon as a theatre stage manager and Jeremy as a producer of commercials and pop videos. • Trevor Gordon Bannister, actor, born 14 August 1934; died 14 April 2011

Ted Lowe

Well-loved voice of television snooker

Ted Lowe's whispering commentary on Pot Black brought snooker to a mass audience
Ted Lowe, who has died at the age of 90 after a short illness, was the voice of snooker commentary from the time the game began to be shown on television until his retirement in 1996. He continued to follow the sport for the rest of his life. Born in Lambourn, Berkshire, Lowe was an enthusiastic amateur player, and became involved in mainstream snooker in 1947 with his appointment as manager of Leicester Square Hall, London. This was the shop window of the professional game, when the roost was ruled, on and off the table, by Joe Davis. Lowe's duties ran from introducing the players, to drumming up publicity, to cleaning the toilets. The BBC used its man of all sports, Raymond Glendenning, for its earliest commentaries, but when he showed up one day with laryngitis, Lowe was thrust into the breach. There was no commentary box, so from the fourth – and back – row of the audience he adopted the "whispering" style that became his trademark. At the other end of the scale, he once commentated from the gods at Blackpool Tower Circus, where he could distinguish between Fred Davis and Walter Donaldson only by "Walter's bald head". Snooker in those days was a niche sport with a rarely changing cast of fewer than a dozen professionals. In 1955, Leicester Square Hall closed after a rent review, and Lowe became sales manager for Ind Coope, the brewers. "Basically I was drinking for a living," he once quipped in relation to the social and entertaining duties to which this sociable man was well suited. In its years in the wilderness, snooker was limited to black and white showings on BBC's Saturday afternoon Grandstand programme. But in 1969 colour came to BBC2 and there was suddenly a requirement for low-budget programmes to which colour was intrinsic. Through its variety of values for different balls, snooker qualified amply on both counts and Philip Lewis, one of the Grandstand producers, rang Lowe to ask if he had any ideas. From this, Pot Black was born, with Lowe providing the players and of course the commentary. An entirely new audience for the game was captivated by keen competition between impeccably dressed and behaved players. Adopting the views of Joe Davis, his lifelong hero, Lowe had strict views on the standards of dress and decorum to be expected of a snooker professional, and clashed with Alex Higgins for that reason. Pot Black contributed to snooker's emergence as a major television attraction, though Lowe could never be persuaded that Stephen Hendry, Steve Davis or any of the modern greats could seriously be compared to Joe. While the modern style of commentary leans heavily on shot analysis, Lowe's was more atmospheric and economical, letting the action largely speak for itself. One word, a surprised and concerned "No", said it all when Steve Davis overcut the short-range black that handed the epic 1985 world final to Dennis Taylor. Sometimes Lowe was an inadvertent source of humour. "For those of you watching in black and white," he once said when not all households had colour sets, "the pink is next to the green." Such remarks seemed only to increase the affection in which he was widely held. He had no enemies in the game and was always on the alert to do it a good turn. The minute's applause for him before the start of this year's world championship final was warm and heartfelt. He is survived by his second wife, Jean, and his son, Michael. • Ted (Edwin Charles) Lowe, snooker commentator, born 1 November 1920; died 1 May 2011

John Sullivan

Creator of TV sitcoms such as Only Fools and Horses and Citizen Smith that became national institutions

John Sullivan, the creator of Only Fools and Horses. 
According to various polls, Only Fools and Horses is the most popular UK sitcom of all time. Its author, John Sullivan, who has died aged 64, after a bout of viral pneumonia, once said "I'll never kill off Del Boy while the public still loves him," and even after the series officially ended in 1991, he kept writing further episodes and "specials" for 20 years. The history of British broadcasting is rich with Dickensian television comedy writing rooted in lower-middle and working-class lives. Johnny Speight created the loudmouthed bigot Alf Garnett; Galton and Simpson came up with Steptoe and Son, the warring rag-and-bone merchants; and Sullivan gave us the Peckham wheeler-dealer Derek "Del Boy" Trotter. Del Boy, with ludicrous aspirations of amassing great wealth, and as played by David Jason, was Sullivan's favourite creation. As the son of an Irish plumber, John Sullivan, and his charlady wife, Hilda, in south London, Sullivan knew people just like Del Boy (so did Jason, whose father was a fish merchant). Many of his characters stepped right out of the Peckham market of his youth into our living-rooms. Audiences knew exactly who they were, and why they were funny, and Christmas without the Trotters became as inconceivable as Christmas without turkey and crackers; Only Fools and Horses regularly attracted viewing figures of over 15 million, sometimes 20 million, and won the Bafta award for best comedy series in 1986, 1989 and 1997. The Trotters were rooted in the aggressive, DIY, self-employed culture and vernacular of working-class south London, Sullivan's world, with Jason's incorrigible wide-boy ("lovely jubbly" was the hand-rubbing phrase at the prospect of sealing another dodgy deal) and his moon-faced brother, Rodney ("you plonker"), played by Nicholas Lyndhurst, acquiring institutional status in the national consciousness. The show began in 1981 as a story of three men of three generations in Peckham, all without a woman in their life. Del's upbringing had installed moral virtue and a sense of family solidarity, even though he would sell any load of old rubbish to gullible punters; and he would protect dim-witted Rodney with his life. The third main character was Grandad, played by Lennard Pearce, a bit of a whinger, retreating into deep sulks, but loveable all the same. When Pearce died in 1984, Sullivan replaced him with Buster Merryfield as the peppery Uncle Albert, who moved into the household after a life at sea. Del's "business" was conducted either from home, or in the back of his little Reliant Regal Supervan with its "Trotters Independent Trading Company" sign; or else in the local pub, the Nag's Head, where the cynical barman, Mike (Kenneth MacDonald), presided over a motley crew of regulars. Most prominent among them were the gangster spiv Boycie, resplendent in his camel coat with a velvet collar, and the slow-witted philosophical mutterer Trigger, characters inhabited by John Challis and Roger Lloyd-Pack to the highest degree of humour and authenticity. So brilliant and accurate was Sullivan's writing that these people really did acquire a life of their own; they only had to appear to fulfil every expectation we had of them, a rare quality in any drama. Love and marriage did enter the Trotter brothers' lives, with Cassandra (Gwyneth Strong) for Rodney, and Raquel (Tessa Peake-Jones) for Del Boy. But the core of the show was the childlike partnership and double act of Del and Rodney, a sort of south London Laurel and Hardy, fuelled equally by irritation and affection. Sullivan saw the success of his story of Del Boy's recurrent failures as symptomatic of the zeitgeist: "He was out there in the vanguard of this new era in British history," he said in 2003. "No one seemed aware of this great tidal swell of change among the working classes, buying property and owning companies, until Del Boy showed Maggie Thatcher the way. I was also very lucky that all this new technology came in as I was writing him, so Del started off with one of those brick-like mobile phones." Sullivan's first producer, Ray Butt, was succeeded in 1985 by Gareth Gwenlan, who says that the pre-eminence of the writer in television comedy is what distinguishes the genre in this country. Sullivan didn't "create" a series and then leave it to others; he wrote every word. Sullivan's ability to write about the world he knew was a rare gift, but sluggish to manifest itself. He grew up in Balham, south-west London, failed his 11-plus examination and left Telfer Scott secondary school aged 15 with no qualifications, except a love of Charles Dickens, whose books "came alive" for him thanks to an English teacher who read them out in class and encouraged his pupils to join in with the characters' voices. He worked as a messenger at Reuters, then for a year at an advertising agency, Collett, Dickenson and Pearce (which employed the future film-makers David Puttnam and Alan Parker), before joining a second-hand car trader as a cleaner, then salesman. He played amateur football for Southside Athletic and joined Watney's Brewery, where an old schoolfriend showed him a newspaper article about the TV scriptwriter Speight earning £1,000 for each episode of Till Death Us Do Part; Sullivan was earning £1,000 a year. He bought a second-hand typewriter and started work on an unproduced sitcom called Gentlemen, about an old soldier running a gents' lavatory. Sullivan bought self-help books and studied English and maths but in 1972 was still working as a plumber. He met and married Sharon, a secretary, in 1974 and decided to work at the BBC as a scene-shifter in order to make some contacts for his writing. Encouraged by the comedian Ronnie Barker, he started writing comedy sketches for The Two Ronnies and Dave Allen. He approached the veteran producer Dennis Main Wilson in the BBC club with an idea about a suburban revolutionary. He took two weeks' leave to write the pilot episode of Citizen Smith at his in-laws' home in Crystal Palace, and Wilson included it in the Comedy Special series, the successor to Comedy Playhouse, which had spawned many sitcom classics. The first of four series of Citizen Smith aired in 1977, with an absurdly funny Robert Lindsay playing Wolfie Smith, a poor man's Che Guevara in a black beret, and leader of the Tooting Popular Front, a small band of inept political terrorists (battle cry, "Power to the People"), running up bar bills and attracting only scorn and indifference. While still writing Only Fools and Horses, Sullivan wrote other popular sitcoms, notably Just Good Friends (1983-86), a comedy romance between Paul Nicholas's working-class bookie, Vince, and Jan Francis's prissier, more middle-class girlfriend, Penny; and Dear John (1986-87) in which a schoolteacher played by the outstanding Ralph Bates muddled through in a west London bedsitter after his wife ran off with his former best friend. The Dear John format was sold to America, where it was remade and (with Judd Hirsch in the lead) then sold back to the BBC, with Sullivan writing some of these episodes himself. Roger Roger (1998-2003) was set in a mini-cab firm and deployed a new set of dubious, fast-talking characters, and Heartburn Hotel (1998-2000), written with Steve Glover, strayed into darker territory, with Tim Healy playing an embittered Falklands war veteran who takes over the Olympic hotel in Smethwick, named in the misguided belief that Birmingham would host the 1992 Olympic Games. None of these later series repeated the runaway success of Only Fools and Horses, and Sullivan even fell out with the BBC when he turned to Dickens; his Micawber (2001), with Jason in the title role, was produced by ITV. Sullivan wrote only the first series of The Green Green Grass (2005-09), in which Boycie and his wife Marlene, played by Challis and Sue Holderness, exchange the back streets of Peckham for the open fields of Shropshire, where they do not take all that successfully to life down on the farm. The third and final episode of another Only Fools spinoff, Rock & Chips, a "prequel" set in the 1960s, is due to be broadcast this Thursday. There were rumours that Sullivan might be writing one last episode of Only Fools, with all the characters rolling up to collect their old age pensions. Lloyd-Pack says that Sullivan always left the writing of each episode to the very last minute; there was rarely a finished script when shooting began. But he had a seemingly bottomless fund of stories to draw on, and the edginess in the rehearsal room undoubtedly fed into the general liveliness of the acting and dialogue. Sullivan himself was a reserved and unassuming man, who loved working with actors, and spent endless hours in the editing room. He never moved in showbusiness circles, preferring to be at home with the family in Reigate, Surrey, where he collected good books and fine wines, and at his holiday apartment in Majorca. He was appointed OBE in 2005 and is survived by Sharon and their three children, Dan, James and Amy, and two grandchildren. • John Richard Thomas Sullivan, screenwriter, born 23 December 1946; died 23 April 2011

Jackie Cooper

A reluctant Hollywood child star, he returned to the spotlight in the Superman movies

Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver, on the set of Treasure Island (1934). They made four films together. 
Jackie Cooper, who has died aged 88, was the first child star of the talkies, paving the way for Freddie Bartholomew, Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney. While they could turn on the waterworks when called for, Cooper beat them all easily at the crying game. Little Jackie, from the age of eight until his early teens, blubbed his way effectively through a number of tearjerkers. Sometimes he would try to suppress his tears, pouting and saying, "Ah, shucks! Ah, shucks!" As a critic wrote in 1934: "Jackie Cooper's tear ducts, having been more or less in abeyance for the past few months, have been opened up to provide an autumn freshet in Peck's Bad Boy." Cooper had started off in the movies billed as "the little tough guy" in eight of Hal Roach's Our Gang comedy shorts. He was a manly little fellow and complained to his mother when, during the shooting of the fight scene in Dinky (1935), the other children were warned to be careful not to hurt him. "I don't want fellows like these to treat me like a sissy!" he said. The sobbing all began with Skippy (1931), based on a popular comic strip, for which Cooper was Oscar-nominated (aged nine and still the youngest best actor nominee) in his first starring role. When he refused to do a crying scene on the set, the film's director, Norman Taurog, who was also his uncle, threatened to shoot Jackie's dog. (The title of Cooper's 1981 autobiography was Please Don't Shoot My Dog.) "Later, people tried to rationalise to me that I had gained more than I lost by being a child star," Cooper wrote. "They talked to me about the money I made. They cited the exciting things I had done, the people I had met, the career training I had had, all that and much more ... But no amount of rationalisation, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses – what I lost – when a normal childhood is abandoned for an early movie career." He was born John Cooper Jr into a movie family in Los Angeles. His father, John, was a studio production manager who walked out on his family when Jackie was two. His mother, Mabel, was a picture palace pianist. Jackie started in show business at the age of three, appearing as an extra with his grandmother, who used to tote him along while looking for film work. In 1931 Cooper made the three films that launched his career. Skippy told of the adventures of two friends, Cooper, in the title role, and Bobby Coogan (younger brother of Jackie "the Kid" Coogan) as Sooky, from different sides of the tracks. Both gave entirely natural performances, and a sequel almost as popular, called Sooky, also directed by Taurog, followed. King Vidor's The Champ was a touching tale of an ex-champion prizefighter (Wallace Beery) and his small son (Cooper) trying to scrape a living in Tijuana, Mexico. Beery is addicted to gambling and drink, but in the eyes of his hero-worshipping son, he's still "Champ". Despite warnings from his doctor about his heart, he wins a comeback fight, but the terrible beating he has taken in the process causes him to collapse and die in the dressing room, in the arms of his weeping son. Cooper was the antithesis of the grizzled, good-bad ugly guy Beery, yet the chemistry between them was remarkable. Cooper would relate years later that Beery off-camera was a disagreeable man. Cooper remembers that he once impulsively threw his arms around Beery after an especially well-played tender scene and that the gruff Beery pushed him away. Cooper produced genuine tears. The duo would make three further films together. In Raoul Walsh's rousing The Bowery (1933) and the sentimental O'Shaughnessy's Boy (1935), the oafish Beery tries to win Cooper's affection. However, the film that Cooper was justifiably most proud of was Treasure Island (1934), in which both he, as Jim Hawkins, and Beery, as Long John Silver, were excellent. The Devil Is a Sissy (1936) starred MGM's three top child actors: prissy Bartholomew, a hit in the title roles of David Copperfield and Little Lord Fauntleroy; lachrymose Cooper; and the up-and-coming, pugnacious Rooney. "The studio used to threaten my mother with Bartholomew, and even me," Cooper commented in adulthood. "They'd say, 'Now, if you're not better in this today, we're going to get Freddie Bartholomew.' They set up this kind of competition, which isn't nice." By 1936, despite his popularity, Cooper had reached his teens, and MGM decided not to renew his contract. After leaving the glossiest of Hollywood studios, he went to Monogram, the poorest, for an atmospheric programmer called Boy of the Streets (1937). He continued to be active playing teenagers for the next six years, appearing mostly in B-movies, with a few exceptions: That Certain Age (1938), as Deanna Durbin's young beau, and in Ziegfeld Girl (1941), as Lana Turner's brother. In Glamour Boy (1941), Cooper played an ex-child star who suggests the studio remake Skippy, the film that made him famous, with a new kiddie. When America entered the second world war, Cooper served in the US navy with the rank of captain. After the war, he found little work in Hollywood and moved to television, having overcome a drinking problem. There were a couple of notable TV series: The People's Choice (1955-58), a sitcom in which he had a basset hound whose thoughts were given voice for the audience; and Hennesey (1959-62), in which Cooper was a naval doctor at a US military base. Cooper returned to the big screen after 13 years in an inane comedy, Everything's Ducky (1961), with Rooney and a talking duck. But most of his time was taken up as an executive producer for Screen Gems, the TV subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, where he worked on the sitcoms Bewitched, The Donna Reed Show and Hazel. In 1972 Cooper directed his only feature film, Stand Up and Be Counted, starring Jacqueline Bisset. Touted as the first American film about women's lib, it received tepid reviews – such as one in the New York Times claiming that "it erratically skips between comedy and serious causes, with somewhat less than impressive impact either way". More rewardingly, Cooper was busy directing numerous TV shows, and won Emmy awards for episodes of M*A*S*H (1974) and The White Shadow (1979). More than four decades after he had been the biggest little star around, Cooper found himself in the full spotlight again when he was cast as the tough-talking, cigar-chomping Perry White, editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, in four Superman films (1978-87). Cooper got the nod after the original choice, Keenan Wynn, had to drop out while on the set in London, due to heart problems. Cooper was married three times and had four children, of whom his two sons, John and Russell, survive him. None of them went into show business, on the wishes of their father. "It's no way for a kid to grow up," Cooper explained. • Jackie (John) Cooper, actor and director, born 15 September 1922; died 3 May 2011

Erhard Loretan

'Night-naked' climber and only the third man to scale all 14 peaks above 8,000m

Erhard Loretan in 1998, below, and above, on the north face of L’Aiguille Verte in Chamonix, France. 
It was no coincidence that Erhard Loretan, who has died in a fall aged 52, should have been working in the mountains on his birthday. For Loretan, any time spent among them was a gift. Whenever he spoke in public, as he did at the Royal Geographical Society in London in November 2010 to raise money for Community Action Nepal, he would thank the mountains for the life they had given him, both as a professional guide and as one of the greatest mountaineers of them all.  
Loretan's climbing record was phenomenal, whether on the highest Himalayan peaks or in his own back yard in the Swiss Alps. History records him as the third person to climb all 14 peaks over 8,000m, behind the Italian Reinhold Messner and the Pole Jerzy Kukuczka, but that barely scratches the depth and scope of what he achieved. Loretan took the principles of climbing fast and light in the Alps and applied them to the biggest mountains on Earth. The classic example of this was his ascent of Everest in 1986 with his climbing partner of 10 years, Jean Troillet. Climbing late in the monsoon, and confined for weeks to their base camp by bad weather, when conditions finally turned good the two Swiss were out of the traps like greyhounds. Leaving base camp in the late afternoon of 28 August, they skied to the foot of the north face and started up the Japanese couloir, climbing through the night unroped and at terrific speed. By early afternoon they had reached the base of the Hornbein couloir at 7,900m. Here they rested, dozing in the warmth of the day before continuing as night fell and the cold returned. After another night of lung-bursting effort – Loretan never used bottled oxygen – they emerged at the summit at 2pm on 30 August before racing back to base in five hours, much of it glissading. Loretan and Troillet's effort, up one of the peak's harder routes, stunned the mountaineering world, but Loretan was almost apologetic. "We didn't intend to climb Everest in two days," he said. "We didn't think we were doing incredible things. It all seemed normal." Loretan was born in Bulle, in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, and was always a restless, adventurous child. When he was seven, however, his father walked out, leaving his mother, Renata, to look after Erhard and his brother, Daniel. "Without him going," Loretan wrote, "perhaps I wouldn't have been a mountaineer." The boy came to admire his neighbour who headed off to the mountains with a rucksack on his back. It was just the sort of life Loretan was looking for. His cousin Fritz was the guardian of the Fründen Hut in the Bernese Alps, and the young Erhard would stay with him in the summer holidays. He climbed his first proper mountain, the Dent de Broc, aged 11 and his first north face aged 13. Yet Loretan was not just an athletic prodigy. He was entirely at home in the mountains. They were his natural habitat, reinforcing a sense of humility and modesty that bordered on the pathological. His friend and patron Rudolf Zingg called him "an anti-star", so reluctant was he to absorb any of the praise his successes earned him. He saw for himself the pressures and dangers in climbing and wanted none of it. At school in Gruyère, he fell in with an older group of dedicated alpinists, Pierre Morand, Jean-Maurice Chappalley and Vincent Charrière, and together they raced through the card of Alpine classics, the north faces of the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses and much more besides. Loretan qualified top of his class as a cabinet-maker, but his future was not going to be spent in a workshop. Considering they were ready for anything, and admiring the Austrian Hermann Buhl, who had made the daring first ascent of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, Loretan wrote to the French alpinist Yannick Seigneur, who had just been there. Seigneur rather grumpily replied that a poignèe de béotiens, a bunch of kids just out of school, should get some experience of altitude first. So Loretan went to the Andes and climbed three peaks over 6,000m, including Palcaraju, and then climbed Nanga Parbat, his first 8,000er, in 1982. Over the next decade and a half he worked his way through the other 13, in 1983 climbing three peaks in the Karakoram – Gasherbrum I and II, and Broad Peak – in just 17 days. His tactic was to go as light as possible, without tents or bottled oxygen or even a sleeping bag. Usually climbing unroped for speed, and fuelled by gruyère cheese, Loretan banked on the notion that the less time you spend high up, the less chance something will go wrong. Everest was an example of this, but there were even more committing climbs, such as his ascent in 1984 of Annapurna via its long east ridge with his compatriot Norbert "Noppa" Joos. This immense crest of the Annapurna massif stretches 7km at an altitude of never less than 7,500m, and after three days of wild isolation, they reached the summit, descending the dangerous north flank of the peak. There were setbacks too. In 1986, after Everest, he persuaded his friend Pierre-Alain Steiner, with whom he had climbed Dhaulagiri in winter for the first time, to try a new route on Cho Oyu. But this time their "night-naked" style, as it was dubbed, backfired. After being caught in bad weather, Steiner slipped as they retreated and fell hundreds of metres. It took Loretan an hour to climb down to Steiner, assuming he was dead, but Steiner had survived, albeit with terrible injuries. Loretan built an igloo and put his partner inside before racing back to base camp for help. There he discovered his Sherpa crew had gone, and it was another three days before he could get back to Steiner with help. Steiner was still alive but died during the rescue, pitching Loretan into a period of depression, a sense of guilt exacerbated by injuries he suffered in an avalanche, and then again while paragliding. As ever, the mountains healed him. In 1989, with André Georges, he climbed 13 north faces in the Bernese Oberland, including the Eiger, in just 13 days. In 1990, in memory of Steiner, he finished the new route on Cho Oyu with Troillet in just 27 hours. Loretan's final 8,000er was Kangchenjunga in 1995. While he was climbing dangerous routes, Loretan had resisted starting a family – he did not want to orphan a child – but after a few more adventures, he and his partner had a son, Ewan, in 2001. Panicked by Ewan's crying one evening at his chalet in Crésuz, Loretan shook the seven-month-old child three or four times, and put him back in his cot, where he seemed to settle. But Loretan had fatally injured the child, who died the next day, Christmas Eve. He was convicted of negligent manslaughter in 2003 and received a suspended sentence of four months. Stricken with guilt and horror at what he had done, he waived his right to anonymity to raise public awareness of the weakness of babies' necks. • Erhard Loretan, mountaineer, born 28 April 1959; died 28 April 2011