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Dateline: 24th February, 2002 John Thaw: 1942 - 2002 John Thaw, who died on Thursday at the age of 60, was, if not the best, certainly one of the best loved of all our TV actors. Born in Manchester, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and began his career on the stage. Amongst the theatres he played were the Royal Court and Manchester's Royal Exchange, and, in 1993, he made his last major stage appearance in David Hare's The Absence of War at the Olivier, directed by Richard Eyre. Two years later it was filmed for TV with the same cast. His television career began in the seventies when he played Detective Inspector Jack Regan in The Sweeney, a series about the Flying Squad. Typically seventies in style, The Sweeney had fast cars, guns, girls and cops who were almost anti-heroes: flawed, willing to bend or even break the rules but ultmaely on the side of the angels. As Starsky and Hutch were American cop icons of the seventies, so were Regan and his sergeant, Carter (Dennis Waterman), in the UK. Subsequent TV roles - Kavanagh QC, Monsignor Renard, Goodnight Mr Tom, The Glass - confirmed his reputation, and his place in the hearts of the British TV-watching public, but his greatest success was as Colin Dexter's Morse, a part which he played for 33 episodes until he was finally "killed off" in late 2000. The last episode, The Mournful Day, was watched by over 12.5m people. Although he knew that his cancer was a very serious one, he had no thought of giving up and, just days before his death, was planning further episodes of Kavanagh QC. Fellow actor and co-star of Morse, Kevin Whately, said of Thaw, "The country has lost quite simply its finest screen actor," and Colin Dexter described his death as "a huge sadness". Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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