George Cole (actor)

George Cole OBE
Cole with Rona Anderson in the 1951 film Scrooge
Born	(1925-04-22)22 April 1925 Tooting, Surrey, England
Died	5 August 2015(2015-08-05) (aged 90) Reading, Berkshire, England
Residence	Stoke Row, Oxfordshire, England
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1940–2015
Spouse(s)	Eileen Moore (m. 1954; div. 1962) Penny Morrell (m. 1967)
Children	4

George Edward Cole, OBE (22 April 1925 – 5 August 2015) was an English actor whose career spanned more than 70 years. He was best known for playing Arthur Daley in the long-running ITV comedy-drama show Minder and Flash Harry in the early St Trinian's films.

Cole was born in Tooting, London. He was given up for adoption at ten days old and adopted by George and Florence Cole, a Tooting council employee and charwoman (cleaner) respectively. He attended secondary school in nearby Morden. He left school at 14 to be a butcher's boy, and had an ambition to join the Merchant Navy, but landed a part in a touring musical and chose acting as a career.

At age 15, Cole was cast in the film Cottage to Let (1941), opposite Scottish actor Alastair Sim. Sim liked Cole, and agreed with his family to take in Cole and his adoptive mother to their home. Acting as his mentor, Sim helped Cole lose his Cockney accent; Cole stayed with the Sim family until he was 27. He later attributed his career success to Sim, with whom he appeared in a total of 11 films, ending with a television film of The Anatomist (1956). Cole also acted opposite Laurence Olivier in The Demi-Paradise (1943) and Olivier's film version of Henry V (1944), of which he was the last surviving cast member. His career was interrupted by his National service in the Royal Air Force from 1944 to 1947, where he was temporarily a radio operator.

Returning to his acting career, he became familiar to audiences in British comedy films in the 1950s. Cole appeared with Alastair Sim in Scrooge (as the young Scrooge) in 1951, also in this film had had a scene with fellow actor Patrick Macnee who played the young Jacob Marley. Coincidentally, George and Patrick died within 6 weeks of each other in 2015. His best known film role was as "Flash Harry" in the St Trinian's films (two of which also star Sim), and in the comedy Too Many Crooks (1959). He also starred in the film Take Me High (1973) alongside Cliff Richard and Deborah Watling. He was known for his lead role in the radio comedy A Life of Bliss (1953–69) in which he played an amiable but bumbling bachelor, David Alexander Bliss (initially played by David Tomlinson). It lasted for six series and 118 episodes, becoming a TV series in 1960. In this form, it ran for two series, but no episode is known to survive.