Garfield Morgan spent half a century being the man behind the desk. As Frank Haskins in The Sweeney he made the rank matter, which is harder than it looks when the two men in front of you are Thaw and Waterman.
Fi1m perspective
Frank Haskins comes into a room already knowing what he is going to hear. Regan has hit someone, or lost someone, or done the right thing the wrong way round, and Garfield Morgan's face has settled into the expression that served him for fifty years: eyes narrowed, mouth set, a man braced for the explanation. He does not compete with the leads for volume in The Sweeney. He does not need to. Thaw and Waterman get the violence and the jokes; Morgan gets the desk, and he makes the desk count.
That was the job for most of his career. He started in regional theatre with the Arena Theatre Company in Birmingham in 1953, directed at the Marlowe in Canterbury and the Library Theatre in Manchester in the late fifties, and was on television from 1955. The police kept finding him. He was DCI Gwyn Lewis in Softly, Softly in 1966, then Haskins in all four series of The Sweeney from 1975 to 1978, and after that a steady run of character parts, senior men and deadpan foils in sitcoms, until 2007. Film came in smaller doses: an Israeli general in The Odessa File (1974), Mr Moley in Our Mother's House (1967), and a last turn as Geoff in 28 Weeks Later (2007).
What he was good at is easy to undervalue. A programme built around two mavericks needs someone whose approval they cannot charm out of him, or the mavericks stop being mavericks and become the whole world. Morgan supplies that person without ever asking for the camera. Our review of The Sweeney put it plainly: he keeps the fact of hierarchy present without competing with the leads for force of personality, and the programme is better for having a man its heroes cannot win over. We noticed, watching again, that we were on Haskins's side more often than the programme wanted us to be, and it was the stillness that did it. When Regan is shouting, Morgan simply waits, and the waiting looks like the more grown-up position.
The limits are real. He was cast to type, and the type was narrow: the superior, the official, the man with the rueful expression who has heard it all before. He did not carry a series himself and his film work stayed at the margins. Against that, he did the narrow thing for decades without letting it go stale, and he did it opposite John Thaw, an actor who could flatten most people sharing a frame with him. Morgan was not flattened.
If you are going back to The Sweeney, watch the scenes where Regan has to answer to him, not only the ones where Regan is doing the damage. The programme is looking at Regan the whole time. Morgan knows it, and behaves like a man who has other things to do.
Biography
Garfield Morgan (19 April 1931 – 5 December 2009) was an English actor who appeared mainly on television. He was born in Birmingham and trained as an actor after working as a dental technician. He began his career in the 1950s with the Arena Theatre in Birmingham and later took on producing and directing roles at theatres including the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury and the Library Theatre in Manchester.
Morgan had a regular role as Detective Chief Inspector Frank Haskins in the ITV series The Sweeney (1975–1978). He had previously played Detective Chief Inspector Gwyn Lewis in the first series of the BBC's Softly, Softly (1966). He appeared in numerous other television series, including The Avengers, The Saint, The Persuaders!, Lovejoy and Bad Girls. His film roles included The Odessa File (1974) and 28 Weeks Later (2007).
He was married to the actress Dilys Laye from 1963 until their divorce.
