Actor;
Born: July 23, 1925; Died: January 8, 2011.
Charles Stapley, who has died at the age of 85, was a regular on Crossroads throughout much of the 1970s, playing Ted Hope, a philandering former Navy captain who ran the local antiques shop. He also had a second claim to fame as the stepfather of Paul McCartney’s high-profile ex-wife Heather Mills, with whom he repeatedly clashed in print.
She called him “evil” and claimed he forced her to leave home. He responded by calling Mills “a very confused woman for whom reality and fantasy have become blurred”.
Born in Ilford in Essex, Charles Stapley spent much of his childhood in Sussex, served in the RAF towards the end of the Second World War, worked for the Rank organisation’s film distribution division and then began to carve out a career in theatre.
Long before Crossroads he was a regular in the mid-1950s on ATV’s fondly remembered series The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene. He appeared in dozens of episodes, playing a series of minor characters, including outlaws and soldiers.
He played Professor Higgins in the West End production of My Fair Lady in the early 1960s. He also toured with the show, appearing at the Glasgow Alhambra in 1964 and again the following year.
Television provided a wide range of work, from George Bernard Shaw to Benny Hill, but he was undoubtedly best known for Crossroads and the role of Ted Hope.
After leaving Crossroads, Stapley had two stints in the West End production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which holds the record for the longest-running stage play, after opening in 1952.
In the 1980s he appeared in the farce No Sex Please – We’re British, with Andrew Sachs, both in the West End and in a touring production which brought him to the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh and which also featured Andrew Sachs and Norman Vaughan.
On television he was Lord Auckland to Jeremy Brett’s Pitt the Younger in Number Ten (1983).
He was on his third marriage when he met Heather Mills’s mother Beatrice, the Scottish daughter of an RAF officer. His first wife was Nan Winton, who became a well-known TV reporter on Panorama.
Beatrice’s erstwhile husband Mark Mills was subsequently jailed for fraud and the two daughters moved in with Stapley and Beatrice, though it seemingly proved a difficult arrangement.
Heather was in her mid-teens. Despite later public rows with his stepdaughter, Stapley conceded Heather had a very difficult childhood.
Stapley died in January, but news of his death only emerged recently. Beatrice died in 1989. He is survived by four children from his earlier marriages.
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