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Biography
Harry H. Corbett OBE (born Rangoon, Burma - now Yangon, Myanmar - February 28th, 1925; died Hastings, Sussex, England, March 21st, 1982) was a distinguished British actor. He was awarded the OBE in 1976 for services to drama.
Corbett was best known for his starring role in the hugely popular and long-running BBC Television sitcom Steptoe and Son in the 1960s and 70s. Early in his career he was dubbed "the English Marlon Brando" by some sections of the British press, but due to typecasting his career never really developed as a major film actor, much to his frustration.
He was born in Burma, now Myanmar, while it was still a British colony. His father was an officer in the British Army who was stationed in the country as part of the occupying forces there. When he was very young his mother died, and Corbett was sent back to England where he was raised by an aunt in Manchester.
Corbett himself served in the army during the Second World War, and following his discharge after the war's conclusion he took up acting as a career, initially in repertory theatre. In the early 1950s he added the middle initial 'H' to his name in order to avoid confusion with the then-popular television entertainer Harry Corbett, who was well known for his act with the puppet Sooty. When asked, he would often joke that the 'H' stood for "h'anything" - a manner of saying the word 'anything' once popular in some English regional dialects.
From 1958 he began to appear regularly in film roles, first coming to public attention as a very serious, intense performer, completely in contrast to the reputation he would later gain as a sitcom actor. He also guested regularly in television dramas, appearing in episodes of popular series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (as four different characters in four different episodes between 1957 and 1960) and Police Surgeon, the series that would later become The Avengers (in 1960). A chance meeting with writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, at the time basking in the success of their groundbreaking project Hancock's Half Hour, would then change Corbett's life.
"I had met Galton and Simpson and told them how much I admired their work, and I really did, and I said to them if they ever felt I could work with them then...well, I never envisaged in a thousand years going into light entertainment. I looked at what was on television and the only thing making any, I don't know, social comment was the Hancocks, the Eric Sykes, this kind of half hour comedy programme, you see. And ooh, I did envy them. Anyway, they remembered this conversation, clearly, and this thing about the rag and bone men thumped through the door. I read it, and immediately wired back - 'delicious, delighted, can't wait to work on it'."
And so in 1962, Corbett appeared in The Offer, an episode of the BBC's anthology series of one-off comedy plays, Comedy Playhouse, written by Galton and Simpson. He played Harold Steptoe, a rag and bone man living with his irascible father Albert, played by Wilfrid Brambell, in a junkyard with only their horse for company.
The play was a huge success and a full series was soon commissioned, which eventually ran, with some breaks, until 1974, where the Christmas special became the final ever episode. Although the enormous popularity of Steptoe and Son - as the series was titled - made Corbett a star, it proved to be a dead-end to his serious acting career, as he became irreversibly associated with the Harold Steptoe character in the public eye. Production on the series was also made stressful by Corbett's strained relationship with his co-star Brambell, and by the end of their time on the series they were not on speaking terms outside of takes. A subsequent tour of a Steptoe and Son stage show in Australia in the late 1970s proved to be a complete disaster, as any sort of working relationship between the pair of them was now impossible.
Steptoe and Son did lead to Corbett gaining some work in comedy films, most notably starring in Carry On Screaming in 1966 and appearing in Terry Gilliam's Jabberwocky (1977). As with many other British comedy programmes of the era, there were also two theatrically-released Steptoe and Son films: Steptoe and Son (1972) and Steptoe and Son Ride Again (1973).
Corbett suffered his first heart attack in 1979 and appeared in pantomime at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley within two days of being discharged from hospital. Corbett's final acting role was in an episode of the Anglia Television anthology drama series Tales of the Unexpected, shot shortly before his death and eventually transmitted two months afterwards, in May 1982. He had died of a massive heart attack in the March of that year, at the age of fifty-seven, in Hastings, East Sussex.
Corbett was twice married:
1) The actress Sheila Steafel
2) Maureen Corbett (two children, one of whom, Susannah Corbett, is an actress, best known for the role of Ellie Pascoe in the BBC's television adaptations of Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe detective novels).
