4 May 2023. Family tree post #71.
A claim to fame to rival the very first in this series.
When my Gt-Grandad, Alfred, was on the Queen Mary with Mary Pickford, and the Normandie with David Niven, little could he have known that his second cousin’s 3-year old lad in Yorkshire would grow up to be an illustrious actor himself!
Roger Rowland was the butler in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a dead journalist in Quatermass and the Pit, and the vicar in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. He apparently had an ability for playing “forgettable characters”, and played more than one role each in King Lear, Coronation Street and First Among Equals.
Roger played ‘First Policeman’ in Probation Officer in 1960, and inordinate subsequent policemen, including in Z-Cars, Softly Softly Task Force, and 15 episodes of Special Branch before being edged out by less genteel characters as the series morphed into The Sweeney.
Best of all though, he was at least one of the policemen in American Werewolf in London! Beat that!
It would have been fun looking out for him on TV when I was a kid, had I only known! By the time Tales of Sherwood Forest rolled around, it was 30 years impersonating police officers… His final appearances were in Canada, where he lived out his life with second wife, Elspeth.
He had been divorced from Anne Stallybrass in 1972. In the following year she was nominated for a BAFTA for playing Anne Onedin, her big break. Before long she was married to the actor playing James Onedin (and they lived happily ever after in a cottage named Onedin, once a filming location for the Onedin Line.)