Actor; Born: May 20, 1915; Died: October 7, 2008.

Peter Copley, who has died aged 93, was one of that band of actors from British film and television whose names remain largely unfamiliar, but whose faces are immediately recognisable.

A bald and very severe-looking individual, Copley specialised in military officers, judges, lawyers, doctors and clergymen. "He would look at home under the cowl of a very austere order," notes The Encyclopedia of British Film; and, in fact, he played Abbot Herribert in the medieval mystery series Cadfael (1994) with Derek Jacobi.

Thirty years earlier Copley had a starring role in the BBC series Thorndyke (1964), as Edwardian forensic scientist Dr John Evelyn Thorndyke. But he will probably be more widely recognised today for a small, supporting role in the Beatles film Help! the following year. He was the jeweller who tries to get the troublesome ring off Ringo's finger.

Inevitably, it was film and television work that took him to the widest audience, but he also enjoyed a successful stage career, beginning in the 1930s.

Born in Bushey in Hertfordshire, he studied acting at the Old Vic School and spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in supporting roles in the classics on stage - he was Edmund to Olivier's Lear and Laertes to Michael Redgrave's Hamlet. He also served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.

Two of his most important films were made with Dirk Bogarde. He played a homosexual who is being blackmailed in Victim (1961), one of the first films to address homosexuality, which was still a crime at the time. The film is credited with helping to change social attitudes and the law in Britain. He was the colonel in the court-martial drama King and Country (1964).

He even managed to fit in a career as a lawyer, becoming a barrister in 1963, which gave him an extra insight when it came to playing legal roles. In the 1970s he appeared as several different characters in the popular courtroom drama series Crown Court.

Other films include Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Shout at the Devil (1976), Empire of the Sun (1987) and Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005).

He appeared in dozens of television programmes, including The Avengers, on which he played two different characters in 1963 and 1968, The Forsyte Saga (1967), Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars (1975) and Casualty, on which he again played two characters, in 1991 and 1999.

Marriages to actresses Pamela Brown and Ninka Dolega ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, writer Margaret Tabor, a daughter and two stepchildren.

BRIAN PENDREIGH