For seventy years George Cole played men working an angle and let us see just enough of the working to like them. The spiv was his trade, from Flash Harry to Arthur Daley, and he did it with more care than the parts asked for.
Fi1m perspective
In Cleopatra (1963), a four-hour film in which everybody talks and Rex Harrison talks best, George Cole plays Flavius, a slave who can neither hear nor speak. He does the part in mime. Our review does not mention him, which is fair; it is a small role in a film mostly made of sets. But it is the odd one out in a career built on voices, the one time Hollywood hired a man known for his accents and asked him to keep quiet. We found ourselves watching him at the edge of the frame during other people's speeches, because a man with no lines was the only one on screen who looked as though he was listening.
The career had two halves and a long middle. He was on stage at fourteen in 1939 and on film in Cottage to Let (1941), and Alastair Sim took him in hand at fifteen. They made eleven films together, among them Scrooge (1951), with Cole as the young Ebenezer and Sim as the old one, and Cole was the Boy in Olivier's Henry V (1944). Then came the spivs. Flash Harry in The Belles of St Trinian's (1954) fixed him as the screen's cockney wideboy, the man with an angle and a smile to go with it, and he played versions of him through the rest of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1979 to 1994 he was Arthur Daley in Minder, opposite Dennis Waterman, and that is the part most people mean when they say his name.
What he did that others did not was hold two feelings in one face. Critics have noticed for decades the vocal dexterity and the exactness of the accents, and those are real, but the better trick was the body: the shoulders selling one thing while the eyes calculated another, so that you could see the man decide to cheat you and half regret it before he had said a word. That is why Flavius, with no words at all, is less of a departure than it looks. He was as good in straight supporting drama as in broad comedy, and he kept doing both across seven decades.
The reservation, and it is the only one anybody has raised, is that the big international films did not come. Cleopatra was the rare Hollywood credit, and it gave him a slave with no lines. British cinema kept him busy and kept him in support. If you want to see what Sim taught him, start with Scrooge, where teacher and pupil play the same man at different ages. He spent seventy years playing men who were not to be trusted, and was trusted the whole time.
Biography
George Cole (1925–2015) was an English actor whose career in film, television and stage spanned seven decades from the late 1930s.
He made his film debut in Cottage to Let (1941) and appeared in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) as the Boy. Cole played young Ebenezer Scrooge in Scrooge (1951) and Flash Harry in four St Trinian’s films (1954–1966). In 1963 he played Flavius in Cleopatra.
He was best known for his long-running role as Arthur Daley in the ITV series Minder (1979–1994). Cole was appointed OBE in 1992.
