Geoffrey Hinsliff, actor whose ‘baddie’ role boosted Coronation Street in the soap ratings war
Geoffrey Hinsliff, the actor, who has died aged 86, was best known for his role as Don Brennan in Coronation Street; one of the ITV soap’s most prolific baddies, his character was at the centre of some of its most dramatic storylines between 1987 and 1997.
A taxi driver and widower when he joined the show, Brennan married Ivy Tilsley (Lynne Perrie) in 1988, but in 1992 began an on-off affair with the barmaid Julie Dewhurst (Su Elliot). When that fell apart, in an attempt to take his life he crashed his car. He survived, although his foot had to be amputated.
Then, after plaguing Denise Osbourne (Denise Black) with obscene phone calls, and dispatching Ivy to a convent (where she died), Brennan bought MVP Motors from Mike Baldwin (Johnny Briggs) with his next partner Josie Clarke (Ellie Haddington). When the garage went bust she left him and he became determined to take revenge on Baldwin, whom he blamed for the calamity.
On April 19 1997 the series-makers Granada, involved in a ratings war with the BBC’s EastEnders, promised “one of the all-time Street classics”, and in an hour-long episode viewers were treated to a cliffhanger in which Brennan, eaten up with hatred, kidnapped Baldwin’s wife Alma (Amanda Barrie) and drove her and his car into Weatherfield Quay.
Viewers had to wait until the next episode to discover that both had survived their watery ordeal. But Hinsliff’s character was living on borrowed time. He was arrested but released on bail, and in October 1997 clubbed Baldwin over the head and then tried to run him over. He missed, crashed into a viaduct and perished as the car became a fireball.
“I am going out in style,” Hinsliff announced before the denouement. “I really have to go. Don’s too far down that road now. He’s virtually a complete mental case and there’s no going back.”
The second youngest of five children of Frank, an engineering company foreman, and Ethel, a former tailoress who died when her son was 19, Geoffrey Hinsliff was born in Leeds on November 23 1937. He left Middleton Secondary Modern aged 15 with no qualifications for a job as a trainee window dresser and began his acting career with a local youth theatre group, appearing aged 16 in a production of Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound at the Civic Theatre in Leeds.
A voracious reader, Hinsliff was largely self-educated and, after National Service, ended up going to Rada on a scholarship. He made his television debut in an episode of Z-Cars and went on to appear in numerous television series including Adam Adamant Lives!, Dixon of Dock Green, Crown Court, Emmerdale, The Professionals and Heartbeat.
His stage roles ranged from Doctor Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a 1979 production at Leeds Playhouse to Widow Twankey in Aladdin at Swindon’s Wyvern Theatre in 2000-01. He had a few small roles in films, including playing a wireless operator in A Bridge Too Far (1977).
Before arriving on “the Street” as Don Brennan, he had previously appeared in a couple of small roles on the soap, in 1963 and 1967.
Hinsliff played George, nominal head of the working-class Fairchild family, in Brass (1983-90), Granada’s spoof on gritty northern period dramas of the 1970s, and he also featured in two Doctor Who stories.
As Jack Tyler in Image of the Fendahl (1977), he and his grandmother Martha Tyler (Daphne Heard), a modern-day witch gifted with psychic powers, helped Tom Baker’s Doctor battle the monstrous Fendahleen.
In Nightmare of Eden (1979) he was Fisk, an Azurian Empire customs officer who wrongly suspects Baker’s Time Lord and his companion Romana (Lalla Ward) of drug-smuggling.
In 2010 he guest-starred in Holby City as an alcoholic.
In 1967, Geoffrey Hinsliff married Judy Seel, who survives him with their two daughters, one of whom is the Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff.
Geoffrey Hinsliff, born November 23 1937, died September 15 2024
