Roland Curram, who has died aged 92, was a versatile and well-groomed supporting actor for more than 40 years. He often sported a manicured moustache and was always dapper and charming.
As indeed he was as Freddie Martin, one of the first out gay characters in TV soaps, among a mixed bag of British expats in the ill-fated 1992 BBC soap Eldorado. A fictional town was built on the Daurada coast south of Barcelona, where it remains to this day as a tourist attraction. The show itself – less of a crowd-pleaser – was axed in 1993.
Still, Curram covered the waterfront as a light comedian on stage in Noël Coward, Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Stoppard, and was not above lending a touch of class to lowbrow British movies such as Every Home Should Have One (1970), starring Marty Feldman, or a rollicking sex comedy, Let’s Get Laid (1978), with Robin Askwith, Linda Hayden and Fiona Richmond.
His best-known performance, however, came in John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965), as a gay photographer and companion to the luminous Julie Christie’s good-time girl as she embraced the Swinging Sixties in London, Paris and Rome while toying with hedonistic lifestyle opportunities and the sexual affections of Dirk Bogarde’s television director and Laurence Harvey’s advertising executive.
Much later, Curram appeared further down the cast list as a menswear salesman in Schlesinger’s Madame Sousatzka (1988), starring an extraordinary Shirley MacLaine as an extravagant Russian-American piano teacher in London.
In the intervening two decades, his stage career took him to the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych as an existential cleric in Jules Feiffer’s hilarious black comedy Little Murders (1967) and to the Birmingham Rep in a 1982 revival of Coward’s Design for Living, in which he played the morally upright art dealer, Ernest, married to an interior designer, Gilda, involved adulterously in a bohemian menage a trois.
When the production transferred to the Greenwich theatre in London, Michael Billington opined that Curram endowed Ernest – usually an ostracised figure of fun – with “such genuine moral passion and such quivering sense of hurt that you entirely see his point of view”.
Curram had himself ventured on both sides of sexual engagement, as he revealed in his 2021 publication, Which Way to Love? He had met Schlesinger in the Carlisle rep in 1952 and had remained a lifelong friend through his similarly fast friendship with the Cornish landscape painter John Miller.
In 1964, while playing Coward’s heterosexually promiscuous matinee idol Gary Essendine in Present Laughter at the Pitlochry Rep, he met the actor Sheila Gish. They married in the same year and divorced 20 years later, after producing two daughters, Lou and Kay.
Gish then began a relationship with the actor Denis Lawson and Roly, as he was widely known, moved in with Paul Linn, a singer and songwriter, in Chiswick. Curram felt liberated into his true self, he said, but remained close to his first family. His civil partnership with Linn was ratified in 2006, later dissolved, and he lived most recently with Clive Castle, an online tarot reader whom he met on holiday.
Curram was born in Hove, East Sussex, the only child of Phyllis (nee Ashdown), a milliner and pub landlady, and her husband, Bernard Curram, an insurance agent. He was evacuated to Ayr in Scotland during the second world war, and educated at Ayr academy, then Brighton college.
He entered Rada to train as an actor aged 16 – his father had died when he was seven – and played in rep between 1952 and 1958 in theatres in Carlisle, Nottingham, Eastbourne and Worthing.
One of his early film roles was in Leslie Norman’s Dunkirk (1958) – no less a movie, in its own way, than Christopher Nolan’s 2017 version of the same wartime evacuation – and his first London bow was at the Royal Court in 1961 in Tony Richardson’s revival of the Jacobean thriller The Changeling, a great play that had not been seen in London for 350 years, alongside Robert Shaw and Mary Ure.
He appeared opposite Fenella Fielding’s Titania as an imposing Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Holland Park theatre; and in a series of high-class touring spin-offs out of the Theatre Royal, Bath: in Stoppard’s Rough Crossing (1987), with Edward de Souza and Susan George; and in Ayckbourn’s Time of My Life (1994), with Anna Carteret and Gareth Hunt.
His last big tour, in 1995-96, was in an Australian imported production of High Society (presented by Paul Elliott), adapted from the screenplay by Arthur Kopit, with a Cole Porter songbook. He played “a very naughty Uncle Willie”, said the actor and producer Tracey Childs (who was playing Tracy Lord).
Curram told the show’s choreographer that he could not really dance but could, if pressed, execute an eccentric sort of 30-second slide. This party piece was incorporated into one big company routine and, said Childs, stopped the show every night.
One of his first films, Up to His Neck (1954), a comedy starring Ronald Shiner, Hattie Jacques and Brian Rix, was described by one critic as “embarrassingly bad”, while his last, Michael Winner’s Parting Shots (1998) was generally deemed “one of the worst films ever made”. Everything else in between, including possibly Eldorado, kept him cheery, fun-loving and, above all, popular with everyone he worked with.
Curram was predeceased by his daughter Lou. His partner, Clive, survives him, as does his second daughter, Kay, and two grandsons, Joe and Frank.
• Roland Kingsford Bernard Curram, actor, born 6 June 1932; died 1 June 2025
• This article was amended on 12 June 2025. Roland Curram appeared as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Holland Park theatre, rather than Regent’s Park theatre, as an earlier version stated. Freddie Martin in Eldorado was among the earliest out gay characters in TV soaps, but he was not the first.
