Geoffrey Hughes

Geoffrey Hughes, who has died aged 68 from prostate cancer, was a hugely popular actor whose success straddled generations and a vast range of entertainment shows.

Hughes was distinct thanks to his 17-and-a-half stone frame, but never limited by his appearance, having the ability to inhabit a variety of disparate characters.

The elder of two sons of a Liverpool docker, Hughes worked as a department store salesman while performing in his spare time with an amateur group, the Merseyside Unity Theatre. He landed his break when the playwright Alun Owen came to watch him accompanied by the actor Tom Bell. That night, Hughes recalled, Bell came back and stayed at the Hughes family home: "He told me to pack my bags there and then, go down with him to London, and he'd find me an agent."

It's no surprise the London agent also saw Hughes's potential, an actor who rarely had a day's unemployment in almost 40 years in the business.

Hughes first appeared on television in the 1960s, in series including Z-Cars and The Likely Lads and had a small role as a bullying bricklayer in Coronation Street. And he was the voice of Paul McCartney in the film Yellow Submarine. But he became a national figure with his second Corrie appearance in 1974, playing the soft-hearted petty criminal turned binman Eddie Yeats in Coronation Street; viewers knew they were witnessing the arrival of an iconic character.

Eddie Yeats, with his distinctive torn hat and habit of getting into scrapes became a Street legend, half of a comedy double act with Stan Ogden (Bernard Youens); the idea of putting together two work-shy, idle, likeable and slightly simple rogues was immensely clever.

Eddie helped out on Stan's window-cleaning round, when the pair could be bothered, and together the pair embarked on several get-rich-quick schemes, including hiring out a timid guard dog, brewing beer in the bath and (in Hilda's absence) renting out rooms.

Eventually Eddie became the Ogdens' lodger but was treated like he were their own son. And he behaved like a son; a hapless teenager, as it happens.

In 1976 it was Eddie who was responsible for the famous "muriel" (mural) that adorned the Ogdens' sitting-room wall, having realised that some of the cut-price wallpaper he had acquired was faded old stock. "It's your muriel feature scenic panorama contrast wall," he explained to a sceptical Hilda. "Dead trendy."

However, in 1982, when Hughes's character took up CB radio, taking the handle "Slim Jim" and falling in love with "Stardust Lil", who turned out to be a florist's assistant, Marion Willis, the actor became unsettled. With an on-screen shotgun wedding in the offing, Hughes didn't think Eddie should be married and settle down; his character was a free-range creature.

And to compound problems, Hughes had found playing in a weekly television soap limiting. He felt typecast, and his weekly trips to the Granada studios in Manchester were keeping him away too long from his family and his 240-acre farm in Northamptonshire.

Hughes believed acting was about playing a variety of characters. He'd loved his previous adventures in theatre, starring in the West End in the Lionel Bart and Alun Owen musical Maggie May, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and farces such as Run for your Wife. And he wanted to show he was capable of playing more than the "cuddly rogue" roles. And he did.

He went on to play Trinculo in a televised version of The Tempest for the BBC and the uncouth Squire Clodpoll in Good Friday 1663 (1995), an avant garde opera on Channel 4. In 2007 he was the Angel Gabriel in the BBC's Liverpool Nativity. Hughes also appeared in several films, including Smashing Time (1967); Till Death Us Do Part (1965); The Bofors Gun (1968); The Virgin Soldiers (1969); Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1972) and Carry On At Your Convenience (1971).

But if anyone needing convincing how good an actor Hughes was, you simply had to contrast his Eddie Yeats performance with his actual life. Hughes kept sheep, renovated many of the old buildings on his farm, turning one into a craft centre which was run by his wife, Sue, whom he first met in a Manchester pub called the Navigation Inn, then owned and run by Pat Phoenix (Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street).

A keen yachtsman, he later became a popular figure at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Cowes, and in 2003 he moved permanently to the Isle of Wight. He was an active supporter of many charities, national and local, and in 2009 he was appointed Deputy Lord Lieutenant for the Isle of Wight, making him "the official link between the island and royalty at formal engagements".

Hughes had appeared to make a full recovery after major surgery for cancer in 1996; within six weeks of the operation he was touring Australia in Alan Ayckbourn's play Bedroom Farce. But the cancer returned and the nation lost a fine actor. He is survived by wife Susan and has relatives in Shetland.