Actor;

Born October 30, 1945; Died November 9, 2011

Richard Morant, who aged 66, was an actor best known for his role as the bullying Flashman in a 1971 BBC adaptation of Tom Brown's Schooldays and for his portrayal of the kindly Dr Dwight Enys in Poldark (BBC 1975-76).

He was born at Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, into a theatrical family. His father was the Shakespearean actor Philip Morant; his uncle and aunt were the actors Bill and Linden Travers; the actress Penelope Wilton was a cousin.

He studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, sharing a ramshackle house in Camden with the singer David Dundas and Bruce Robinson. The house and the riotous lives lived there inspired Robinson when he later wrote and directed the cult film Withnail and I.

He then joined the Prospect Theatre Company and after appearances at the Edinburgh Festival in 1967 he was given more substantial roles in the company's productions Twelfth Night and Richard II.

He landed the part of Flashman after taking a small role in Battle of Britain (1969). His sadistic Flashman won Morant many young female admirers and led to the late Ken Russell casting him in a biopic about Mahler (1974) as a lover of the Mahler's wife. In 1973, he played the Prince of Wales in a five-part television adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's novel, Woodstock.

Poldark was followed the TV movie Scarlet Pimpernel (1982), in which he played Robespierre; the Neil Jordan horror film, The Company of Wolves (1984); and a television drama, John and Yoko! A Love Story (1985), in which he played Brian Epstein.

But by the mid-1980s his acting work was in decline and he followed a secondary career as a dealer in carpets and textiles, running a successful gallery in Notting Hill.

In 1988 he played Theodore Dyke Acland in the television miniseries Jack the Ripper and subsequently made guest appearances in such series as New Tricks and Midsomer Murders.

In 1969 he married Melissa Fairbanks, the daughter of Douglas Fairbanks Jr, with whom he had a son and a daughter. The marriage was dissolved and he married secondly, in 1982, Valerie Buchanan, with whom he had another son and daughter. His wife and children survive him.