Even where none was present on his noggin, the dogged, moustachioed and often terminally repressed characters in which James Cossins specialised always seemed to sport a virtual bowler hat, so completely did he embody old school middle-class values and hang-ups. Often these concealed a deviant side, as with his sex-seeking civil servant at the opening of Death Line, or his kleptomaniac transvestite confronted by Bette Davis in The Anniversary (‘If I didn’t do what I do, God knows what I’d do!’)
FINEST HOUR: The quietly despairing Brown in Clement-LaFrenais gangster grotesquerie Villain, a fed-up clerk mixing it with Richard Burton’s gay hood out of punctured post-war self-esteem
