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    Sudley Dutton RIP

    The popular and excellent actor Dudley Sutton, probably best known as Tinker in Lovejoy, has died at 85.

    Thread title is a reference to this sweet anecdote.

    Here's another one that made me smile. We must never forget the courage and excellence of gay men of that generation, being themselves and living their lives when to do so was a crime.

    #2
    DS appearing is one of the great incidental pleasures of watching TV reruns of varying vintage. He last popped up for me in an episode of '60s psychiatry drama The Human Jungle, playing a boxer who had lost his clobbering mojo. The proposed treatment included a dose of LSD, for which our man might well have adopted the method approach given the opportunity.

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      #3
      RIP Tinker

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        #4
        I prefer this one -


        https://mobile.twitter.com/mwrightwr...98476334387201

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          #5
          Of course, also Reg Urwin in Porridge, central to the "Desperate Hours" episode which by coincidence I watched last week when it popped up on the guide.

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            #6
            Not a bad actor. Never knew if he was gay. Didn't care much.

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              #7
              He had an absolutely excellent face, didn't he? Was never going to be a proper leading man as such but the acting world is all the better for someone who looks a bit different. He also looks like my mate Trevor but you won't know him.

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                #8
                Loved him in the ever-wonderful Lovejoy, of course, and I'd clean forgotten he was in 'The Desperate Hours'. The anecdotes in the assorted Twitter links here are fantastic, and yes indeed what a marvellous distinctive face he had. My best example of Benjm's maxim in the second post here is when Dudley showed up as a terrifying Russian(?) hitman in the first episode of Smiley's People, which I saw for the first time only a couple of years ago when they reran the whole thing on BBC 4.

                By strange coincidence it was only a few days ago that my brother told me about a new podcast he'd recently come across, the brilliantly-named Lovejoy Actually, that's going to trawl through the whole series one episode at a time. I'd bookmarked it myself for listening to soon but not got around to starting it yet. Damn shame Tinker will never have the chance to appear on it in person now. RIP Mr Sutton.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Gerontophile View Post
                  Not a bad actor. Never knew if he was gay. Didn't care much.
                  For what it's worth, he apparently wasn't: his obituary in the Guardian notes he "was married four times, and is survived by three children, Peter, Barnaby and Fanny." (I know, that doesn't necessarily rule it out...)

                  But he was, as the link in DM's original post suggests, a determined campaigner for gay rights:
                  He found a kindred spirit in the playwright Joe Orton: “To fight the demon of homophobia with a West End comedy was brilliant,” Sutton thought. Sutton was vehemently committed to the legalisation of homosexuality, having seen gay friends hounded and humiliated.
                  Two of his earliest roles in the cinema, in The Boys (1962) and The Leather Boys (1964), both directed by Sidney J Furie, allowed him to act on his beliefs. While filming the latter, in which he played a gay biker, he threw the producer off the set after being told he was “not being camp enough”.

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                    #10
                    I referred in another thread to familiar faces that you are always pleased to see. Dudley Sutton was one of them. RIP.

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