Actor and star of The Adventures of William Tell

Born: April 13, 1925;

Died: January 13, 2016

CONRAD Phillips, who has died aged 90, was an actor who found success as William Tell at the height of the 1950s craze for swashbuckling television dramas but later retired from acting and became a Scottish hill farmer.

He won his role in The Adventures of William Tell, which ran on ITV from 1958, after appearing in several of the adventure series that were popular at the time, including The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Richard Greene.

William Tell was very much in the same vein as Robin Hood and followed the hero’s efforts to rebel against the tyrannical rule of the Austrian Emperor in Switzerland in the 14th century. The first episode featured the legendary incident in which Tell shoots an arrow through an apple placed on the head of his son. Like Robin Hood, the show also had a stirring theme tune sung to Rossini’s William Tell Overture.

Phillips relished the role, but it was the early days of television and time was tight. “It was an adventure every week,” said Phillips. “I had sword fights, knife fights and fist fights every week and we were always up against time to shoot the film.” Phillips was also frequently hurt during filming and performed one episode from a wheelchair with the camera tight on his face and another actor doing the long shots.

He was born in London, the son of a journalist father who also wrote detective novels. After school, he worked in the insurance and aviation industries before joining the Royal Navy as an able seaman. He saw action during the Second World War in the Atlantic and North Sea and was invalided out in 1945 with tuberculosis.

He then trained as an actor at Rada and started to forge a career on stage and film in the 1950s and 60s, appearing in Sons and Lovers in 1960, No Love for Johnnie in 1961 and the Miss Marple spoof Murder She Said starring Margaret Rutherford.

However, it was on television that he carved out a niche for himself as a man of action in shows such as The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel and The Count of Monte Cristo. In later years, he also had recurring roles in two television soaps: The Newcomers in the late 1960s and Emmerdale Farm in the 1980s. He was also in the classic Fawlty Towers episode The Anniversary.

He then largely gave up acting and moved with this wife Jennie to work a 50-acre farm in the south-west of Scotland. In her book about the experience, Jennie said it was a struggle at first as neither she nor her husband knew anything about farming. “We had to learn from scratch how to successfully rear two-week-old calves, make hay, plough and do all the things that farmers do,” she said. After six years, the couple sold up.

In the late 1980s, Phillips had a role in the French drama series about William Tell, Crossbow, although on this occasion he was not playing the central part. He retired from acting in the 1990s and wrote an autobiography in 2013, Aiming True.

He is survived by his wife and their two daughters.