For fans of 1970s TV noir, Callan, the image of Russell Hunter will forever remain as Lonely, the seedy, haunted looking grass who the series' eponymous hero, played by Edward Woodward, leaned on in more ways than one.

In real life, Hunter could not have been more different. A gregarious bon viveur, raconteur and lover of good wine, he possessed the steely intellectual depth of an autodidact, which he applied rigorously to a stage and screen career spanning more than half a century.

Such gravitas was apparant in his last major stage role during 2003's Edinburgh Fringe, when he took part in a production of Twelve Angry Men, in which a dozen jurors deliberate over a young boy's innocence. Played in real time, and with a cast made up of well-known comedians, it was one of that year's big draws. Onstage without a break for more than two hours, Hunter gave a measured, wizened performance that, for a 78- year-old who'd already suffered a heart attack and a triple by-pass operation, must have been exhausting. Given that he'd been diagnosed, too, with leukaemia, which he didn't reveal until this January, it must have been doubly so.

Yet the lung cancer that eventually felled him this week at the age of 79 didn't prevent him from starring in the film,

American Cousins, a romantic comedy released last year, which received the Special Jury Prize at the Savannah Film Festival in the US. Nor did his illness, for which he was taking seven tablets a day alongside painful monthly injections, stifle his more sociable attributes as a well kent man about town.

A gaunt-looking Hunter was last seen in public at the first night of The Royal Lyceum Theatre's production of Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman, and it was only with great reluctance that he pulled out of a tour of The Matchmaker. He was set to act opposite Una McLean, his wife since 1991, the love of his life, and commonly regarded as the woman who finally tamed a cavalier with a fondness for the ladies.

Born in Glasgow in 1925, Hunter spent much of his childhood living with his maternal grandparents in Lanarkshire. When he returned to his parents' tenement, it was a precariously hand-to-mouth existence straight out of a sociology textbook. With his father unemployed, his mother earned money scrubbing floors. An apprenticeship in the Clydeside shipyards seemed to have mapped out his life. But, like others later, including funny man Billy Connolly, with whom Hunter starred in the TV film, Deacon Brodie, the roughhouse banter of such a macho industry was an accidental stepping-stone to a wildly different way of life to that expected of him in the school of hard knocks.

Hunter moved to Leith, where he became a keen amateur actor. Eyeing up the good life away from the shipyards, in 1946 he turned professional, making his name in a stage production of Sean O' Casey's The Plough And The Stars, a piece of gritty realism his common touch was perfect for. In 1947 he appeared at the first Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In between these two landmarks, he returned many times, often in one man shows such as Jock.

With his career on the rise following his appearance opposite Archie Duncan in the 1950 film, The Gorbals Story, work took Hunter further afield, to London, Stratford and beyond. By this time he was already married, to actress Marjorie Thomson, with whom he had two daughters, Anne and Leslie. A life on the stage, however, was all consuming, and the marriage fell apart.

In 1965 Hunter was instrumental in setting up The Royal Lyceum Theatre Company with Brian Cox and others. Much of this decade, however, was spent down south, where, following his appearance in Peter Hall's open-air production of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Regent's Park, Hunter hooked up with actress and aristocrat Caroline Blakiston. The once unlikely liaison between a back- street boy and a sophisticated party girl seemed to epitomise swinging London. Jet-setters such as Peter Sellers would attend Hunter and Blakiston's regular shindigs.

Around this time, Hunter was cast as Lonely in Callan. The series took off, with Hunter's weasely physiognomy stealing the show, and tapping into the public consciousness with a performance full of vulnerability and pathos that went on to define him beyond the panto turns he was equally adept at. The series lasted six years, with a big-screen version in 1974. There were guest slots, too, in other cops and robbers dramas such as The Sweeney. Hunter and Blakiston married and had a son, Adam, but after nine years, the marriage foundered. Hunter nursed a broken heart for many a year.

He nevertheless remained incorrigible, and in company was charm personified. He adored the company of women, and was no more at home than when surrounded by a phalanx of pretty actresses.

During the 1980s, Hunter appeared in The Scottish Theatre Company's majestic production of Ane Satyre Of The Three Estaits, which travelled to the Warsaw Theatre Festival with the cream of the country's acting elite. Later he appeared in Tony Roper's Paddy's Market at Glasgow's Tron Theatre, while in the 1990s he stretched himself even further with the title role in Greta, James Duthie's play for Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre in which Hunter played a camp, cross-dressing fantasist.

Hunter's expressive comic's face, lined with experience, made him perfect for work by his much loved Samuel Beckett, and it seemed fitting that such an elder statesman as himself should tour with Krapp's Last Tape, in which a man in his twilight years replays excerpts from his archived past. It was a masterful study of existential torment leavened with a vaudevillian instinct for the ridiculous.

By this time, Hunter had married for a third and final time to actress Una McLean. It was a perfect match. Like Hunter, McLean was a much-loved stage veteran whose talents could be applied to heavy-duty tragedy as well as lighter fare. Fittingly, they fell for each other while in panto in 1989, sharing the stage in a production of Babes In The Wood.

Settling in Leith, the pair unofficially became Edinburgh's first couple, ambassadors for the city at functions they hosted with the aplomb of a double act who'd known each other for half a century before romance blossomed. Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University College bestowed Russell and Una with honorary doctorates, and the pair were regular guests on graduation day.

Similarly, Russell would be at Una's first nights, as he was during The Traverse production of The Slab Boys, casting an eye as critical as it was devoted.

The night before he was taken to Edinburgh's Western General Hospital, McLean records that the pair shared a wonderful dinner together. It's almost as if Hunter were giving himself a send-off. Typically, it will have been awash with the finer things in life; good food, fine wine and the best company to share it with alongside with a few generously expanded stories. It would be soundtracked with laughter. Generous, spirited and sparkling as it no doubt was, Russell Hunter's laughter matched his spirit. We'll miss them both.

Adam Russell Hunter, actor, born February 18, 1925; died February 26, 2004.

NEIL COOPER