Terence Morgan, the tall, suave actor who appeared in 1950s films including Turn the Key Softly, Tread Softly Stranger and Dance, Little Lady, has died at the age of 83, his family said.
Morgan died of heart failure on August 25.
Born in London, Morgan won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
His first film role was Laertes in Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet in 1948. He followed this by playing Orsino in a live BBC stage production of Twelfth Night.
Morgan developed a line in engaging film cads, supporting Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo in the swashbuckling nautical yarn Captain Horatio Hornblower in 1951 and playing a dishonourable mercenary who risks his wife’s life in the 1953 movie Encore.
In Mandy, released the same year, he played the father of a deaf girl who fights with his wife, played by Phyllis Calvert, over her wish to send the girl to a special school.
In the sequel, Dance, Little Lady, he was seen exploiting Mandy’s talent for ballet, and in Turn the Key Softly, he plays a ne’er-do-well who persuades his girlfriend to help him with a burglary.
He demonstrated a light comic touch in films such as Always a Bride, where he played a man sucked into a swindler’s activities, and The March Hare, where he was a feckless, horse-loving aristocrat.
In The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb in 1964, he was cast as the evil son of King Ramses VIII, and in The Penthouse (1967), he played an estate agent whose girlfriend is abducted.
His final feature film was The Lifetaker in 1975, in which he played a businessman plotting revenge on his wife and her lover.
Morgan is survived by his wife and daughter. A funeral was held on August 31. — Sapa-AP