English actor and star of Wycliffe dies at 85
British actor Jack Shepherd, perhaps best remembered for starring in the 1990s ITV crime drama Wycliffe, has died aged 85.
The Leeds-born TV star died in hospital surrounded by his wife and children after a “short illness”, the PA news agency reported.
“His passing is a sad loss for us all,” said his agents Markham, Froggatt and Irwin.
His awards include the Olivier award he received in 1983 for the original production of the stage play Glengarry Glen Ross.
He had an earlier television incarnation as Bill Brand in the 1970s in ITV’s series of the same name about a fictional firebrand Labor MP.
Shepherd also had numerous film roles and was a playwright and theater director.
After school in Leeds, he won a scholarship to Newcastle University to study fine arts, then moved to London to study at The Central School for Speech and Drama.
He appeared on stage at the National Theater and the Royal Court theatre.
He earned a Bafta nomination in the best actor category in 1977 for his groundbreaking role in television as Bill Brand.
The show was described here: An audience tribute last year As a “time capsule of the 1970s – everywhere brown, cigarette smoke and lunchtime beer, patterned wallpaper, rusty Ford Cortinas and a sense of national decay”.
Shepherd’s character is described as “part of a long tradition of reminding the Left of the principles it has deviated from in its quest for power.”
As brooding Det Supt Charles Wycliffe, Shepherd solved more than 36 cases of murder in Cornwall between 1993 and 1998.
His work as an actor in BBC productions ranges from his teaching role in Play for Today: Pidgeon – Hawk Or Dove. (1974) to a lawyer in Blind Justice (1988) and the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn in the BBC docudrama Beethoven (2005), to an Auschwitz prisoner in the drama God on Trial (2008).
Shepherd directed The Two Gentlemen Of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe in 1996, and the production also moved to Broadway.
He worked in numerous theater productions with director Bill Bryden and was also a saxophonist and jazz pianist.
Jack Shepherd is survived by his wife, Ann Scott, and their five children, Jan, Jake, Victoria, Catherine and Ben.
