Michael Elphick

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Michael Elphick bigraphy, stories - Film

Michael Elphick : biography

19 September 1946 – 7 September 2002

Michael John Elphick (19 September 1946 – 7 September 2002) was an English actor. Elphick was known in the UK for his trademark croaky voice and his work on British television, in particular his roles as the eponymous private investigator in the ITV series Boon and later Harry Slater in BBC’s EastEnders.

In his prime, Elphick always looked older than he was, and with his gruff Cockney accent and lip-curling sneer he often played menacing hard men.

Elphick struggled with a highly publicised addiction to alcohol; at the height of his problem he admitted to consuming two litres of spirits a day, which contributed towards his death from a heart attack in 2002.

Career

After graduating from drama school Elphick was offered roles primarily as menacing heavies. He made his debut in Fraulein Doktor (an Italian-made First World War film circa 1968). He went on to play the Captain in Tony Richardson’s version of Hamlet (1969); landed parts in cult films such as The First Great Train Robbery and The Elephant Man and appeared in Lindsay Anderson’s allegorical O Lucky Man! (1973). In 1983 he played the role of Pasha in the film Gorky Park, for which he received a 1985 Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award nomination. He was also seen as Phil Daniels’s father in the cult film Quadrophenia (1979) and as the poacher, Jake, in Withnail & I (1987). In 1984 he played the lead, Fisher, a British detective recalling under hypnosis a dystopian, crumbling Europe and his hunt for a serial killer in Lars von Trier’s Palme D’Or nominated debut film, The Element of Crime.

On stage, Elphick played Marcellus and the Player King in Tony Richardson’s stage version of Hamlet at the Roundhouse Theatre and on Broadway and he later played Claudius to Jonathan Pryce’s Hamlet at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Richard Eyre. In 1981 he appeared in the Ray Davies/Barrie Keeffe musical Chorus Girls at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and he was also seen in The Changing Room, directed by Lindsay Anderson, at the Royal Court Theatre. His last West End stage appearance was in 1997 as Doolittle in Pygmalion directed by Ray Cooney at the Albery Theatre.

However it was for his television roles that Elphick became best known. He briefly appeared in Coronation Street (1974) as Douglas Wormold, son of the landlord Edward, who for many years owned most of the properties in the road. Douglas unsuccessfully tried to buy the Kabin newsagent’s from Len Fairclough.

In 1979 he appeared in Crown Court as Neville Griffiths QC, prosecuting the daughter of the Selsey family for harming her abusive father.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1150534/ He was the only actor in that three-part story to correctly pronounce "Selsey" as "Zell-Zey", in the manner of the West Sussex village near where his mother lived in Chichester.http://www.knowhere.co.uk/Chichester/West-Sussex/South-East-England/info/celebs

He played one of the main roles in the film Black Island in 1978 for the Children’s Film Foundation, played a villain in The Sweeney episode "One of Your Own" (1978) and played a policeman in The Professionals episode "Backtrack" (1979) and had a minor role in Hazell (1979), and appeared in the Dennis Potter play Blue Remembered Hills (1979). Elphick took the title role in Jack Pulman’s drama Private Schulz (1981). Here he played Gerhard Schulz, a German soldier conscripted into SS Counter Espionage during the Second World War to destroy the British economy by flooding it with forged money.

He appeared as the Irish labourer Magowan during the first series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (1983) and starred as Sidney Mundy in the ITV sitcom Pull the Other One (1984), before playing Sam Tyler in four series of Three Up, Two Down (1985–89). In 1986 Elphick landed his biggest television success, Boon (1986–92, 1995). He played Ken Boon, a retired fireman who opened a motorbike despatch business and later became a private investigator. Boon was very successful and ran for seven series, attracting audiences of 11 million at its peak. There was also a one-off episode screened in 1995, two years after it had been made. During breaks from Boon, Elphick continued to act in film with cameo roles in The Krays (1990) and Let Him Have It (1991).