Johnny Leeze, who has died aged 78, of a heart attack following a positive test for coronavirus, was one of a band of standup club comedians from the north of England who found success as a screen actor.
He was best known for playing the father in two television soap families. First came the role in Coronation Street of Harry Clayton, a trombone-playing milkman, who arrived at No 11 on TV’s famous cobbles in January 1985 with his wife, Connie, a dressmaker, and daughters, Andrea and Sue.
However, the Claytons’ stay on the street was short. A new producer decided the characters brought in as a “normal family” – just at the time when the BBC was launching the rival soap EastEnders, with its more sensationalist approach – were not working. They were written out after only eight months, doing a moonlight flit when Andrea became pregnant with Terry Duckworth’s baby.
Leeze returned to club work and took occasional TV bit parts until Mervyn Watson, the producer who had hired him on Coronation Street, was appointed to the same job on the Yorkshire soap Emmerdale. Watson cast him as Ned Glover – who arrived with his wife and three children in a caravan in 1994 after losing his leasehold farm – and put him at the centre of the action from the start. Ned was challenged to a bare-knuckle fight by another newcomer, Zak Dingle. After a bloody battle, the pair rolled down an embankment into a stream, where Ned struck the final blow.
The storyline reminded Leeze of his youth in a South Yorkshire village. “I could relate to that,” he told me, during his five-year run in Emmerdale. “I got into numerous fights as a teenager. It was like the wild west! If you had a fight with someone one week, their cousin would come for one the next.”
Leeze left Emmerdale in 1999 but made two brief returns for events involving Ned’s younger son, Roy – that year for the teenager’s wedding and in 2000 persuading the boy to join him in Ibiza, where he had bought a bar.
Johnny Leeze was born John Glen in York to Doris (nee Bagnall) and Harold Glen. The family moved to a village near Rotherham when he was 13 and, two years later, he left school to start his working life as a gas fitter and plumber, a job interrupted only by army service as a sergeant and tank recovery mechanic.
After returning to his day job, he came second in a local talent contest and started performing in clubs. “I met Geoff Lee, a vocalist going nowhere fast, and I was a comedian going nowhere fast, so we formed a duo, Geoff and Johnny Lee,” he recalled.
When Lee left after a year, he continued alone as Johnny Leeze and added singing to his comedy skills. In 1976, four years after he turned professional, an agent spotted him and he was soon getting work as an extra in Emmerdale Farm (before its title change).
He started landing small, one-off roles on TV, such as a man whose car tyres were let down by Ronnie Barker and David Jason in Open All Hours (1982), a hospital orderly in the Alan Bennett play Intensive Care (1982), a pub landlord in the sitcom Hallelujah! (1983) and a football fan in Juliet Bravo (1983).
Later came guest roles in All Creatures Great and Small (1988), Heartbeat (1993), Phoenix Nights (2001) and Life on Mars (2007), as well as a run in the second series (2000) of the comedy The League of Gentlemen, as Inspector Cox, who is in the pocket of Hilary Briss (played by Mark Gatiss), the butcher and purveyor of the mysterious “special stuff”. Leeze also took four parts in Last of the Summer Wine between 1983 and 2002.
In soaps, he had two other credited roles in Coronation Street, as Mr Slater, a potential buyer of No 7, in 1982 and the Weatherfield County football manager Laurie Johnstone in 2005, as well as one in Emmerdale, as a lorry driver taking cattle to market for Alan Turner and Joe Sugden in 1983.
Leeze’s 1969 marriage to Carol Helliwell ended in divorce in 1983. In 2004, he married Julie Cruddas, from whom he later separated. He is survived by Nicola and Holly, the daughters of his first marriage.
• Johnny Leeze (John Harold Glen), actor and comedian, born 31 December 1941; died 25 October 2020
