Inventor of the Etch A Sketch, a toy that became an instant hit

While the Etch A Sketch – the much-loved but infuriating toy that made drawing less an art than a feat of manual dexterity – is known throughout the developed world, few were aware of its origins. The red and silver-grey plastic box with knobs on was invented in France, where it was known as the télécran (TV screen) or ardoise magique (magic slate), by an enterprising electrical technician, André Cassagnes. Fame has come to him only after his death at the age of 86. It was announced by the Ohio Art Company, the American firm that has produced the Etch A Sketch since 1960, selling 100m of the toys.

Like many of the finest inventions, the Etch A Sketch came about by accident. Cassagnes grew up in the southern Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine. He might have followed in his baker father's footsteps but for an allergy to flour. Instead, he trained as an electrician.

While fitting a light-switch plate in a factory, Cassagnes noticed that after he had peeled a sheet of protective plastic from the plate, pencil marks made on one side transferred to the other side. The factory made a wall covering and used metallic powders. Powder particles had clung to the underside of the plastic sheet, and with the help of static electricity stayed there. Cassagnes's pencil marks had displaced them, tracing visible lines through the powder.

In 1959, the resulting gadget, which originally had a joystick instead of two knobs, was presented at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. The Ohio Toy Co, as it was then, spotted it, but was not at first impressed. However, its founder, Henry Winzeler, thought it had potential, bought the rights to manufacture the toy for $25,000 and took on Cassagnes to refine its design. The red plastic box, with a grey screen and two white knobs – designed to resemble a television screen – went on sale just before Christmas 1960 and was an instant hit. It became the company's signature product.

The beauty of the toy has always been its low-tech simplicity. Drawings are made by turning the knobs, which scrape a stylus through the aluminium powder particles on the underside of the screen. The marks, which seem to appear magically on the screen, disappear when the toy is shaken and the powder is redistributed. In recent years, sales have been hit by electronic and computer games, but the Etch A Sketch never completely went away. It enjoyed a brief revival after featuring in the first two Toy Story movies, and earned some notoriety through a recent political metaphor.

During last year's US presidential election, one of candidate Mitt Romney's aides likened his campaign to an Etch A Sketch: "You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again." Everyone seized on the remark as evidence that Romney's political stance was easily shaken and changeable.

Ohio Art produced the toy in Ohio until 2000, when it moved production to China. In 1998, the Etch A Sketch entered the US National Toy Hall of Fame and the American Toy Industry Association named it as one of the 100 most memorable and creative toys of the 20th century.

Such was Cassagnes's anonymity that even the experts sometimes got it wrong when asked who invented the toy. As legend had it, Cassagnes could not afford to take out the patent himself, and his original investor's assistant, Arthur Grandjean, who registered it, is often credited, though erroneously.

Cassagnes continued working as a technician for the same French company until he retired in 1987. He also continued designing toys, including the SkeDoodle, another drawing toy, but in the late 1970s became fascinated with kites after watching them being flown in the wind above a Normandy beach. He went on to become recognised in the kite world as France's best designer and maker of competition and stunt kites.

"I am not an artist, but I love symmetry and geometry. I am not an engineer, but I am ingenious," he told a kiting magazine in 1992.

Cassagnes is survived by his wife Renée, daughter Sophie and sons Patrick and Jean-Claude.

• André Cassagnes, inventor, born 23 September 1926; died 16 January 2013

My dear friend Richard Eyre, who has died aged 83, was a churchman to his fingertips, but that stereotype gives only a two-dimensional sketch of a robustly three-dimensional man. All his natural instincts were Anglo-Catholic, and to the end he never failed to say the daily office, the bedrock of his spiritual life.

Richard was born in Cuckfield, West Sussex, the third of three children of Montague, an officer in the Indian police, and his wife, Ethel. He was educated at Charterhouse, Surrey, and, after his national service, went to Oriel College and St Stephen's House, Oxford.

His marriage in 1963 to Anne, a good deal younger and more rebellious than him, was life-changing. He came to accept the ordination of women and gay partnerships, at first with reserve but then with enthusiasm, and as dean of Exeter (1981-95) he turned out to be a safe pair of hands, guiding a cathedral with many echoes of Barchester into the modern world. He had to navigate some stormy waters with the chapter, but was greatly admired in Devon for his campaign to engage the whole community.

His friends admired his dedication but will remember him more for his humour and wit, his uproarious laughter, his widely eclectic reading in modern history, particularly the first world war, and his love of France and French wines. He would loudly gargle vintage clarets in the local bistro, entirely oblivious of his neighbours' startled glances.

A wise spiritual guide to dozens of people, Richard collected people as others collect stamps. He would drive long distances to keep in touch with the frail or lonely, taking with him vegetables grown in his garden or marmalade made by his own hands.

He was instinctively ecumenical. He settled a century-old dispute with the Roman Catholic Duke of Norfolk on the day he was appointed vicar of Arundel in 1965.

And when he was chaplain to the English community in Pau, south-west France (2000-02), he became a close friend of the local Roman Catholic parish priest and was invited to preach in his fluent but idiosyncratic French and even to concelebrate at mass.

There were many occasions when he was asked to mediate in bitter personal conflicts and distressing pastoral problems. He had a quiet judicious wisdom which untied many knotty problems, and people trusted him. Many will feel that a great oak tree has disappeared from the land.

He is survived by Anne and two daughters.

Stephen Varcoe's obituary of the baritone John Carol Case reminded me of a very special occasion when he made an unscheduled appearance in my home in Basildon, Essex. It was during a period of 1970s industrial action and widespread power cuts. The Arts Centre, Basildon, was staging a series of midweek recitals given by a variety of musicians: the list included Benjamin Luxon and Case.

It was announced from the stage during Case's recital that the concert would not continue after the interval due to a power cut. At that time, my family's house was regularly used for informal recitals by members of Basildon Music Club, so I took the plunge and asked the manager whether Case would agree to continue his recital at our house, some 10 minutes from the arts centre.

He agreed and duly arrived with his accompanist, Daphne Ibbott. John said to her: "You and I have performed in some strange places…"They continued the delightful recital in torch and candlelight; particularly memorable song was Benjamin Britten's arrangement of The Foggy, Foggy Dew.

Half of Womack & Womack, the husband-and-wife duo that enjoyed huge chart success in the 1980s

Cecil Womack, who has died aged 65, saw his role as one of R&B's backroom boys – a songwriter, producer, arranger and session singer for dozens of illustrious clients. But he will be best remembered as one half of Womack & Womack, whose 1980s chart success outstripped that of even Cecil's more famous brother, Bobby.

Cecil was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of five brothers. His father, Friendly Womack, assembled a family band in the late 1950s. Cecil was eight years old when he and his siblings – Friendly Jr, Curtis, Bobby and Harry – started touring the midwest gospel circuit as the Womack Brothers, accompanied by their mother, Naomi, on organ and their father on guitar.

The brothers came to the attention of Sam Cooke, who invited them to open for one of his shows (a terrified young Cecil wet himself when confronted by Cooke's 500-strong audience) and later signed them to his SAR label in 1961. Cooke changed their name to the Valentinos, relocated them to Los Angeles and encouraged them to take the same journey from gospel to secular R&B that he had taken.

They had three hits (Looking for a Love, I'll Make It Alright and It's All Over Now), but when Cooke was shot dead at a motel in Los Angeles in 1964, they were left without a mentor. Bobby married Cooke's widow, Barbara, months later, and the backlash from bitter Cooke fans left the Valentinos without a career. A 1966 comeback single for Chess Records failed to chart.

That year, Cecil married the former Motown singer Mary Wells, best known for the chart-topping My Guy. Her career was in decline, but Cecil co-wrote and co-produced several tracks for Wells, including The Doctor (1968). The couple had three children and divorced in 1977. Wells went on to have a child with Cecil's older brother Curtis. In 1979 Cecil married Linda Cooke, daughter of Sam Cooke and erstwhile stepdaughter of Cecil's brother Bobby. (In his 2002 autobiography, Bobby wrote that he had had a relationship with Linda while he was married to her mother.)

Cecil and Linda had known each other since they were children. After marrying, their careers as songwriters and performers flourished. In 1980, Teddy Pendergrass had a hit with their song Love TKO (later covered by Bette Midler, Boz Scaggs and Hall & Oates) and Cecil and Linda quickly became an in-demand songwriting duo, their songs recorded by Randy Crawford, George Benson, Patti LaBelle, the O'Jays, Millie Jackson, Johnnie Taylor, Loleatta Holloway and Bobby Womack.

These were emotionally draining, adult love songs, sweetened by infectious Philly disco beats. Soon they were writing for themselves and landing hit singles as Womack & Womack: Love Wars (1984) and Teardrops (a No 3 in the UK in 1988) were both tightly plotted psychodramas on the subject of infidelity. Following the Love Wars album (1983), a string of other LPs ensued: Radio MUSC Man (1985), Star Bright (1986) and Conscience (1988).

There were further songwriting credits (for Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Angie Stone, Ruby Turner and the Beautiful South) and more Womack & Womack albums, including Family Spirit (1991), but a trip to Nigeria in the early 1990s would prove life-changing for both of them. After discovering ancestral ties to the Zekkariyas tribe of Nigeria, the couple moved from their homes in Philadelphia and southern California to explore Africa. Cecil adopted the name Zekkariyas and Linda became Zeriiya. Subsequent releases, including Secret Star (1994), were credited to The House of Zekkariyas.

The couple lived in South Africa but also had a home in Thailand, where an estate and recording studio that they had started building was destroyed by the tsunami in 2004. They continued to tour and record with their seven children.

Cecil is survived by Linda and his children.

• Cecil Womack (Zekkariyas), singer, producer and songwriter, born 25 September 1947; died 1 February 2013

Lead singer with the Troggs, best known for their hits Wild Thing and Love Is All Around

The Troggs were not among the most technically proficient of British pop groups of the 1960s, but they generated great affection among audiences and disc jockeys alike. The naivety of their sound, their songs and, above all, the singing of Reg Presley, who has died of lung cancer aged 71, made records such as I Can't Control Myself and With a Girl Like You into big international hits.

Presley's most lasting performances, however, were on Wild Thing (a 1966 hit soon adopted by Jimi Hendrix) and the wistful 1967 ballad Love Is All Around, given a new lease of life when a version by the Scottish band Wet Wet Wet was used in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral. In the 1970s, the Troggs were feted by the punk generation, while the infamous "Troggs tapes", a recording of a heated discussion at a studio session, was said to have inspired a scene in the cult 1984 film This is Spinal Tap.

Presley was born Reg Ball in Andover, Hampshire. After leaving school at 15, he played the guitar in a local skiffle group, but by day worked as a bricklayer. His musical career lay dormant until the early 1960s when a fellow worker, Howard Mansfield, suggested forming a band. Mansfield was the singer and lead guitarist, with Ball on bass guitar. When Mansfield left, Ball reluctantly took on the role of lead vocalist, accompanied by Ronnie Bond on drums, Chris Britton on guitar, and a bass player, Pete Staples. As the Troglodytes, they won a Battle of the Bands talent contest in Oxford in 1965, and sent a demo tape to the rock entrepreneur Larry Page, who shortened their name to the Troggs.

They signed a recording contract with CBS Records and a nondescript first single, Lost Girl, appeared in 1966. At this point, Page asked the New Musical Express journalist Keith Altham for help in finding a better stage name for the lead singer. In order to get media attention, Altham suggested altering Ball to Presley and the new name was listed alongside those of the other Troggs in the NME's next issue. Unfortunately, Page omitted to tell his lead singer of the name change and Ball, enraged, confronted Page, thinking that he had been replaced in the group.

Next, Page had the group tackle the inane-sounding Wild Thing, by the US composer Chip Taylor. Despite their misgivings about its corny lyrics, the Troggs achieved almost instant success with their version, thanks to Presley's mock- seductive vocals and the tense pauses in the instrumental backing. Presley was still working on a building site, with a colleague who had a transistor radio tuned to a pirate radio station. After playing Wild Thing, the DJ announced that it had just risen from No 44 to No 8 in the hit parade. "I thought, whew, and threw my trowel down," Presley told an interviewer. "I put my head in the door and said, 'clear out my tools, I'm off'."

Wild Thing reached No 2 in the UK charts and went one better in the US. The next single, the gentler With a Girl Like You (1966), written by Presley, became the group's first and only No 1 in Britain. The Troggs were immediately part of the pop elite, setting off on a tour with the Walker Brothers. "It was so great," Presley recalled. "It was like landing on the moon for the first time."

For the next three hits, Presley, as writer and singer, reverted to the cartoon lust approach of Wild Thing. I Can't Control Myself (1966), which was banned from radio in several countries, was followed by Any Way That You Want Me (1966) and Give It to Me (1967). Night of the Long Grass (1967), with its hint of drug references, sold less well, but it was the prelude to Love Is All Around, a No 5 in Britain in the autumn of 1967.

That was the final top 20 hit for the Troggs and it was during the vain quest to repeat the peaks of 1966-67 that the Troggs tapes were made. On the recording, Presley and his colleagues can be heard arguing with expletive-strewn incoherence about the need to "sprinkle fairy dust" over their latest efforts.

With the advent of the punk aesthetic, the Troggs were recognised, slightly inaccurately, as a pioneering "garage band", who had not allowed themselves to be held back by a lack of musical virtuosity. In 1981 they recorded a live album at the New York club Max's Kansas City and in 1991 combined with three members of REM to record the album Athens Andover. In later years, Presley also devoted himself to the study of crop circles and UFOs, and published a book on the subject, Wild Things They Don't Tell Us, in 2002.

The Troggs continued to perform to loyal fans in Europe. They were especially welcomed in Germany, where they were touring when Presley was taken ill in December 2011. When the seriousness of his condition became apparent, he announced his retirement.

Presley is survived by his wife of 50 years, Brenda, and by a son and daughter.

• Reg Presley (Reginald Maurice Ball), singer and songwriter, born 12 June 1941; died 4 February 2013

South African-born contralto whose motto was 'speak when you sing, and sing when you speak'

The South African-born contralto Sybil Michelow, who has died aged 87, sang a wide range of works, at the core of which was the oratorio repertoire from Handel to Elgar. In 1949, she went to London to study the piano, and became a student of Franz Reizenstein. She also composed, producing scores for two plays by Bertolt Brecht while teaching at Rada (1956-58). However, after singing in the choir at Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, she settled on a vocal career and five years later made her debut in Bach's St John Passion.

An international career of performances, broadcasts and recordings followed. She appeared throughout Europe and in Israel, and in 1963 returned to South Africa in Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. The conductors she worked with included Ernest Ansermet, István Kertész, Jascha Horenstein, Malcolm Sargent, John Barbirolli, Adrian Boult and Charles Groves.

At the Edinburgh Festival she sang Verdi's Requiem and Schubert's Mass in E flat under Carlo Maria Giulini; a recording of the latter work was released in the BBC Legends series. In London, she gave BBC Proms first performances of songs from Hindemith's Das Marienleben and from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn; she also performed the same composer's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen. At the 1968 Last Night she sang Rule Britannia and Träume, from Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder. Four years later she was one of the 16 soloists in Vaughan Williams's Serenade to Music, conducted by Boult, for a concert to mark the 50th anniversary of the BBC.

A native of Johannesburg, Sybil was the second of three artistically talented daughters born to parents of Lithuanian-Jewish background. At the age of four, she passed piano exams adjudicated by the composer Granville Bantock: in 1968 she sang in a BBC concert to mark the centenary of his birth. She gained her music diploma at the University of Witwatersrand (1945), and her broadcasts as a pianist and composer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation included a production of her children's theatre score Pop Goes the Queen (1944), choreographed by John Cranko.

After her arrival in London, in 1950 she married Derek Goldfoot, a GP whom she had known in South Africa. From 1954 to 1961 she studied singing with the contralto Mary Jarred.

Notable among the many 20th-century works she performed was Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time, recounting the Nazi oppression of Jews against a background of American spirituals. She gave many premieres and was the dedicatee of Wilfred Josephs' Nightmusic (1970), with orchestra, and songs by Ronald Senator and Malcolm Williamson, with whom she formed a duo in 1984. Their recording on the label run by the B'nai B'rith organisation featured Williamson's Jewish works and songs by Israeli composers.

Michelow recorded Arthur Bliss's Pastoral, with Wyn Morris conducting, and Esperanto songs by Frank Merrick. She was the soloist on the premiere recording of Sicut Umbra by Luigi Dallapiccola, and in 1969 formed the ensemble Musica Intima with the violist Christopher Wellington and pianist Ronald Lumsden, later Benjamin Kaplan, in order to present less familiar works.

Michelow's high standard of tone production and diction was reflected in her motto: "Speak when you sing, and sing when you speak." In later years she was a teacher and governor of the Royal Society of Musicians.

Derek died in 1985.

• Sybil Michelow, contralto, born 12 August 1925; died 5 January 2013

Actor best known for his role as the rugged and handsome captain in The Onedin Line

James Onedin, the protagonist of the long-running BBC television series The Onedin Line, gained his splendid name from a sea nymph. After the programme's creator, Cyril Abraham, had read about mythological figure Ondine, he transposed the "e", thus making her a man. And what a man: Peter Gilmore, who played Onedin in 91 episodes from 1971 to 1980, had tousled hair, flinty eyes, hollow cheeks, mutton-chop sideburns racing across his cheek, lips pulled severely down, chin thrust indomitably forward to face down the brewing gale. He has died aged 81.

The sea captain did not so much talk as emit salty barks that brooked no demur. In 1972, while filming, Gilmore was buzzed by speedboats from the Royal Naval College. Still in character as Onedin, he yelled irascibly at the tyro sailors: "Taxpayers' money! Where are your guns? What use would you be if the Russians came?"

Like Horatio Nelson, Francis Drake and to a lesser extent the early 70s prime minister Edward Heath, the very cut of Gilmore's jib suggested that the British – if only in prime-time costume dramas – still ruled the waves. For many, Gilmore's name conjures up the stirring Adagio from Khachaturian's ballet Spartacus that was used on the opening credits. Madly and marvellously, Onedin set up a shipping line with sailing vessels in late-19th century Liverpool at a time when steamships were taking over the seaways.

By series two, his business model had seen off the sceptics but his wife, Anne, had died in childbirth. That plot twist was partly explained by the fact that the actor who played her, Anne Stallybrass, had decided to return to the theatre.

To honour his dead wife's memory, Onedin added a steamship to his fleet called the Anne Onedin and then allowed Kate Nelligan (as a coal-merchant's eligible daughter) and Caroline Harris (as a 20-something worldly wise widow) to vie for his affections. He spurned both, marrying his daughter's governess, Letty Gaunt, who died of diphtheria. By the eighth and last series, Onedin was married to a third wife, Margarita Juarez, and had become a grandfather.

Before Howards' Way, The Onedin Line was the BBC's nautical franchise: Abraham wrote five novels loosely based on his television scripts, while Gilmore was frequently asked to launch ships and was also bombarded with fan mail and advice from veteran sailors. He parlayed fame into reviving a former career as a singer, releasing in 1974 an album of sailor shanties called Songs of the Sea and in 1977 another called Peter Gilmore Sings Gently.

He regretted that he became too typecast as Onedin to get other lead roles. In 1978 he starred opposite Doug McLure in the film Warlords of Atlantis as an archaeologist searching for the fabled underwater city who ends up battling a giant octopus and other sea monsters.

Gilmore was born in the German city of Leipzig. At the age of six, he moved to Nunthorpe, near Middlesbrough, where he was raised by relatives, later attending the Friends' school in Great Ayton, north Yorkshire. From the age of 14 he worked in a factory, but later studied at Rada. While undertaking national service in 1950 he discovered a talent for singing and after his discharge joined singing groups who performed all over the country.

During the 1950s and 60s he became a stalwart of British stage musicals, appearing in several largely unsuccessful shows, including one called Hooray for Daisy! in which he was the chief human in a drama about a pantomime cow. He even released a single in 1960 as a spin-off from his performance in the musical Follow That Girl, opposite Susan Hampshire. In 1958 he appeared on the pop programme Cool for Cats, where he met the actor Una Stubbs, then one of the Dougie Squires Dancers, who were weekly tasked with interpreting hit songs in movement. The couple were married from 1958 until 1969.

His success at this time in British and US TV commercials led him to be cast in comedies, with 11 appearances in Carry On films, two of which – Carry On Jack (1963) and Carry On Cleo (1964) – gave him early nautical roles. In 1970 he married Jan Waters, with whom he starred in both stage and television productions of The Beggar's Opera, he playing the highwayman Captain Macheath.

The Onedin Line brought Gilmore the fame that had eluded him. In 1976, he and Jan divorced and he started living with Stallybrass, whom he married in 1987. In 1984 a new generation of viewers saw Gilmore as Brazen, the security chief of a distant human colony called Frontios in Doctor Who's 21st series. Brazen died heroically while helping the Doctor escape. Gilmore made his last stage appearance in 1987 in Michael Frayn's Noises Off and his last screen one in the 1996 television movie On Dangerous Ground.

He is survived by Anne and a son, Jason, from his first marriage.

• Peter Gilmore, actor, born 25 August 1931; died 3 February 2013

• This article was amended on 7 February 2013. The original stated that Follow That Girl was Susan Hampshire's only foray into musicals. This has been corrected.

When I was teaching a dozen years ago at the same Herefordshire school as Frank Keating's beloved wife, Jane, she enabled a group of my GCSE pupils to meet and greet him in an interview session as part of their English coursework. We worked through our questions, which focused almost entirely on football as seen from a youthful Herefordshire perspective. Frank was able to sidetrack his questioners somewhat, gently and enthusiastically filling us in on his experiences with local celebrities – in particular, Ian Botham. His great knowledge of sport clearly enthused this class of 15-year-olds. To end with, he recalled his early days as a Hereford Times reporter.

Later, his pupil interviewers gave him high praise: "He's all right, isn't he, Miss?" I hope they remember their priceless experience with him: I certainly do and with great fondness.

I got to know Henry Strzelecki when he was my lecturer at what was then the Domestic and Trades College in Manchester. When I cycled to the college I would meet him, also cycling, as he stopped on the way to buy chocolate for us to have in our coffee break. In teaching a City and Guilds course in pattern drafting, tailoring and design, he would encourage the class to push the boundaries with our designs and ideas, always with an infectious enthusiasm which made you the more determined to make it happen. I recall him telling me that the new fabrics in bright colours, together with the growing interest in sailing, was a business opportunity ready to be taken. How right he was.

My mother, Joyce Ferlie, who has died aged 87, was an inspiring teacher of French with a particular interest in promoting foreign languages, Anglo-French twinning and facilities for young people.

She was born Joyce Howlett in Upton, Wirral, and went to a local grammar school, then took a French degree at Liverpool University. Her father was a civil servant and strongly promoted education for women.

After three years as an education officer in the RAF, she met and married Tom Ferlie, my father. They were happily married for more than 55 years and lived in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, for a long period in the 1960s and 1970s. Joyce was active in the Kenilworth community, as one of a new generation of female graduates taking on local civic roles as well as family responsibilities. It was an optimistic time and she contributed to the development of the growing town.

As a long-standing teacher of French at Abbey high school (now Kenilworth school and sixth form), she was noted for her inspiring lessons and her copies of Paris Match, which brought an exotic touch, as did her very modern trouser suits.

She always had an international outlook and was a great supporter of building local links with France. A founding member of Kenilworth Business and Professional Women's Club, she was also an active member of the committee of Kenilworth Youth Club. She became a volunteer in the Workers' Educational Association and the local Anglo-French twinning association after moving to Hook Norton in Oxfordshire in 1980.

After a period in the Cotswolds, Tom and Joyce eventually retired to Exeter to be near my brother, Peter.

Tom died last year. Joyce is survived by me and Peter.

Our mother, Dorothy Meade, who has died aged 88, was co-author with her friend Tatiana Wolff of Lines on the Underground, a literary journey around London. They had started working on the book while at university in Cambridge; it was eventually published in 1994, when they were both in their 70s.

Dorothy was born in Cambridge, the daughter of Phyllis (nee Seward) and Michael Sampson, and went to St Paul's girls' school in London. She was the older sister of the journalist and economist Anthony Sampson, later helping to research his 1997 book The Scholar Gypsy, about their grandfather John Sampson, friend of Augustus John. Their maternal grandmother was the painter Marion Seward.

Dorothy taught at Toynbee Hall, the east London centre of the Workers' Educational Association, after the second world war, then for the Council of Industrial Design in the 1950s, as part of the team at the Festival of Britain. She wrote for Woman magazine, Design, and Time and Tide, and co-wrote Design to Fit the Family for Penguin Books in 1965. The introduction to that book could serve as her manifesto for life and its relationship to decor, and may explain why she gathered such a diverse and devoted circle of friends around her Hampstead home where she lived with her husband, Peter, whom she married in 1953.

It declared: "A house should be a living thing, designed for the people who live in it … People, not things, must have the upper hand. Your house and the things in it must fit your way of life … A tough, washable material can still look luxurious; and it sets your mind at rest and looks smart for very much longer. The 'ideal' home is the one that makes allowances for the far from ideal people inside it."

Dorothy was a lifelong learner. After Peter's death in 1989, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and became increasingly housebound but was an enthusiastic silver surfer and participant in MS society outings to art galleries and museums. She was always a source of practical tips for staying positive and avoiding despondency; her last ambition was to master her iPad by the time she was 90. She didn't make it, but predictably the IT experts who helped her became her close friends.

We survive her, along with four grandchildren, Anna, Ben, Joe and Dora.

Makeup artist who created Yoda and Chewbacca for the Star Wars films

If there was a film made in Britain between the early 1940s and early 1980s that required innovations in makeup and prosthetics design, chances are that Stuart Freeborn, who has died aged 98, was involved in it in some capacity. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, David Lean's adaptation of Oliver Twist, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Omen, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back: all these benefited from Freeborn's pioneering approach to makeup. When audiences gaze with wonder upon the apes in the "dawn of man" sequence at the beginning of 2001, or fall under the spell of the 2ft tall guru Yoda and his gnomic proclamations, their response is a testament to Freeborn's persuasive artistry.

He was born in Leytonstone, east London, where it was assumed that he would follow in the footsteps of his father, an insurance broker. But Freeborn showed artistic leanings from an early age: "At school, if I did paintings, they were the ones that would be put on the wall," he said. He became an enthusiastic cinemagoer, drawn especially to horror films starring Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff, whose monstrous faces he would recreate on himself as soon as he got home from the cinema.

He took on various jobs to help pay for the expensive and increasingly sophisticated makeup experiments that he would conduct by night. He also photographed the results and dispatched pictures of his efforts to studios in Britain. When no replies were forthcoming, he would troop off to the studios in person, only to be ejected from the premises.

However, Freeborn's go-getting method bore fruit when he sent evidence of his work in 1935 to Alexander Korda's newly founded Denham studios in Buckinghamshire, and he was hired and trained by the noted makeup artist Guy Pearce. "I never stopped from that moment," said Freeborn.

Stars of every stripe were in and out of his makeup chair, from Vivien Leigh and Anna Neagle to Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton. He worked on period dramas, perfected his use of ageing makeup and made modifications to the flawed formula used by Hollywood on its bald-caps. This career was interrupted by the second world war, during which Freeborn trained as a fighter pilot before being diagnosed with Asian flu and haemophilia.

He returned to prosthetics work in the early 1940s and built the pot belly worn by Roger Livesey in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). His first on-screen credit came in 1946 with the wartime thriller I See a Dark Stranger, starring Deborah Kerr as an Irish woman spying for the Nazis. But he became most widely known as a result of his highly controversial makeup for Alec Guinness as Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948).

The extravagantly hooked nose devised for the avaricious crook led to accusations of antisemitism, the vehement protests even preventing the film from being shown in Berlin. The outcry shocked Freeborn, who said he was half Jewish; he also claimed that he and Lean had experimented with a more modest nose during makeup tests, but the results had caused the character to resemble Christ.

He worked with Lean again on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and made the acquaintance a few years later of Stanley Kubrick, who hired him to design the various physically dissimilar characters played by Peter Sellers in the satire Dr Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Freeborn was to come up with the greatest innovations of his career several years later when Kubrick sent him the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey, promising "five to six months' work" which turned into several years.

The extended sequence of apes foraging and fighting provided Freeborn with his most daunting professional challenge, since it demanded bodysuits that were light enough to allow these predominantly non-verbal characters to communicate fluidly through gesture. Facial movement was also important, and Freeborn came up with an early animatronic technique for allowing the apes to snarl. Freeborn would later draw on this approach when designing the character Chewbacca for Star Wars (1977). He also had to rig a supply of milk to some actors' ape costumes to allow them to "feed" the real baby chimps in their arms. And he was responsible for the extreme ageing makeup used on the actor Keir Dullea in the devastating final sequence.

Like most people involved in Star Wars, Freeborn claimed to have no expectations about the film's commercial potential, but he accepted happily the commission from the young director George Lucas, who at that point had only two movies to his credit. "He was so genuine about it, I thought, well, young as he is, I believe in him," said Freeborn. "He's got something. I'll do what I can for him." His responsibilities included designing the ghoulish clientele of the Cantina, where a bulb-faced band played for the amusement of men with porcine snouts; loitering in the murk was the bounty hunter Greedo, who resembled a cross between a mouse and a lychee.

Freeborn's services were retained for the sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), in which his designs for Yoda and the bloated slug Jabba the Hutt were of particular note. He based Yoda on Albert Einstein, while others saw the image of Freeborn himself in the wizened sage. Other credits included the first four Superman films (beginning with Superman the Movie in 1978) and the wartime spoof Top Secret! (1984).

Freeborn was predeceased by his wife, Kay, as well as by their three sons, Roger, Ray and Graham (the last of whom was also a makeup artist and worked frequently with his father). He is survived by eight grandchildren.

• Stuart Freeborn, makeup artist, born 5 September 1914; died 5 February 2013

Ian Breach and I covered the 100-day-long Windscale inquiry into nuclear waste in Cumbria. Ian's grasp of the subject was as formidable as his capacity for the odd glass at the end, and sometimes at the beginning, of a long inquiry day. One night after he had filed his copy to the Financial Times, we shared too many glasses. When we arrived late back at our hotel in St Bees, the owner had locked up. He had omitted to close an upstairs window so Ian promptly decided that was the way in and up he climbed. Unfortunately, the hotel was next to a bank and his antics triggered an alarm; sure enough, the boys in blue arrived to arrest him. Ian's charm won out and the hotel was duly opened up.

On the final day of the inquiry, Ian failed, for the very first time, to appear until very late on. When he arrived, the hearing was on the point of ending. Ian smartly grabbed my own words and rewrote them in FT style, with considerable speed and depth. Mr Justice Parker summoned us to give us an unexpected judicial pat on the back, particularly for Ian's worthy reporting. We then repaired to the nearest bar to celebrate.

Alan Martin, who has died after an accident at home, aged 49, was an extraordinary dancer, musician and poet based in Merseyside. Affected by cerebral palsy from an early age, he was profoundly disabled, with no recognisable speech, and throughout his life was a wheelchair user. He was often treated as if he also had a learning disability (a very common experience for those who cannot speak to express their feelings and thoughts).

When he was 31, a group of his friends raised funds to buy him a communication aid and Alan revealed himself to be a poet and thinker. Alan's life changed and he became a tireless worker for full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of life. His only regret about his communication aid was that he would have preferred it to have a scouse accent.

Alan fully embraced new technology to achieve his desire to become a professional artist: he used the electronic speech aid for poetry; synthesisers and computer programs for music; and, for dance, a specially designed electric wheelchair that spun, tilted and rose up to give full expression to Alan's movement.

One of his first and most inspiring performances was of his poem This Chair Is Not Me, which he set to music. His words were spoken through his electronic speech aid, and enhanced by his music and inspiring dance.

In 2003, Alan started a relationship with the Colourscape music festival, of which I am director. His first performance was in his home city at the Liverpool Colourscape festival. Many others followed, including a large-scale work commissioned by the festival, linking colour with dance and music.

Alan's greatest achievements with Colourscape were in education. We believe that he was the only dancer in the world running workshops using an electronic speech aid. As well as teaching young disabled people to dance and move and create performances, he was a huge inspiration through the way he lived his life. Many saw for the first time how there could be a fulfilling life for them through the arts. They also saw how a profoundly disabled person could structure the practical parts of his life using technology and with the help of personal assistants.

In 2006, Alan reached a wider audience when he appeared in the cast of the BBC3 series I'm With Stupid, intended to change attitudes to disability through humour, which was co-written by Peter Keeley, a man with cerebral palsy.

Alan is survived by his mother, Jean, brothers, Andy and Paul, and sisters, Gaynor and Heather.

Pamela Jennings, who has died of cancer aged 48, had been a care assistant, a supermarket checkout girl and a bell lyre player in her youth. But as "Soho Pam", she spent the last 15 years of her life begging a living in the square half-mile east of Wardour Street, in London.

Short, stooped, with owlish glasses, she worked familiar haunts, from the French House to the Coach and Horses, in perpetual hunt of £7 for her bed in a Victoria hostel. "Regulars" willing to donate got a hug and a cry of "love you". The seven quid was usually got early; the remainder went to William Hill, which no one begrudged her. Photographed, painted and written up by Soho-ites numerous times, she was clothed, cared for and ferried to hospital by them when she became ill in 2012.

Throughout, her past remained a mystery, becoming clearer after her death - the sad story of a girl, remembered by her siblings as enthusiastic and accident-prone, becoming afflicted with mental health problems, and then devastated by her mother's death in 1998. Drifting away from home, she limited contact with her family and let Soho take her in. Initially a drinker, she quit in the early 2000s – the only time, as one of her regulars, that I heard her angry was when someone accused her of spending money on booze.

Alistair Choate, the publican of the Coach and Horses, negotiated her down to two visits a day, which would slip back to six. A local hairdresser styled her for free, and a regular-become-friend Sally Taylor took her on excursions for clothes ("Sally, I need pants"). The police once arrested her for selling travelcards; they ended up giving her breakfast. She got a preliminary diagnosis of her final illness from an ambulance officer outside Bar Italia.

The anecdotes filled books, her life became a legend, but Pam was more than a mascot. Her lack of guile ascended to a sort of grace. She never called on pity for cash, nor did she regard it as her right. She loved life, without agendas, and reminded others to do the same. That became her job, what she was paid for. Her overflowing wake at the Coach was the first such gathering she hadn't worked in a long time, and the streets around felt empty without her.

She is survived by her brother, Michael, and sister, Susan, and a niece, Montana, and nephew, Matthew.

A founding father of the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, the international effort to preserve natural habitats for birds

Geoffrey Matthews, who has died aged 89, played a crucial role in waterbird and wetland conservation during the second half of the 20th century. Described by one former colleague as "the engine room behind Peter Scott", he worked indefatigably to save the world's wetlands and their wildlife from the many threats they faced – and continue to face.

His greatest and most enduring achievement came as one of the founding fathers of the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, the first truly international effort to save natural habitats from destruction. He also spent more than 30 years, from 1955 to 1988, as director of research and conservation at the Wildfowl Trust (now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust), where he worked closely alongside Scott.

Scott and Matthews shared a vision: they both understood that the only way to save endangered waterbirds was to safeguard the wetlands where they live. Today, this concept is at the centre of mainstream conservation, but at the time most effort was focused on saving individual species, as it was widely assumed that their habitats were not under immediate threat.

Waterbirds such as ducks, geese and swans are particularly dependent on cross-border co-operation, since their migratory journeys take them from their Arctic breeding grounds to their winter quarters farther south and west – including, of course, the UK. But their need for different places to breed, where they can stop over during migration, and where they can spend the winter, makes them uniquely vulnerable to habitat loss.

At first, Matthews focused on the key wintering sites for waterbirds in Britain, co-operating with wildfowlers and landowners to establish a network of reserves and refuges. Meanwhile, he and his team of scientists at the Trust's HQ, at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, were conducting in-depth research on wildfowl, making crucial new discoveries about their migratory habits.

In 1956 he became the British delegate for the International Wildfowl Research Bureau (now Wetlands International), and was made its honorary director in 1969. By then, the scale of wetland habitat loss across Europe and Asia was becoming clear, with action urgently needed.

Involving the Soviet Union, where millions of waterbirds breed, was essential. But this was at the height of the cold war, and getting co-operation from behind the Iron Curtain was thought to be difficult, perhaps impossible. Nevertheless, Matthews persisted, mobilising his extensive international contacts to persuade people that something needed to be done to prevent the world's wetlands from being drained and destroyed. His efforts, and those of his colleagues Luc Hoffmann, Erik Carp and Eskandar Firouz, bore fruit when, in early 1971, the historic Ramsar Convention was signed at the city of that name in Iran. Delegates from 18 countries, including Iran and the Soviet Union, agreed to safeguard wetlands and their wildlife.

Today, the convention has no fewer than 164 member states, and more than 2,000 designated wetlands of international importance, which cover a total area of almost 200m hectares – about 800,000 square miles. The date when it was signed – 2 February – is now designated as World Wetlands Day.

Matthews was born in Norwich, Norfolk, where his father was a vet for the Ministry of Agriculture, and educated at Bedford school. He went on to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences. In 1942, after just a year at university, he was recommended for RAF Bomber Command by his tutor, CP Snow. He served as a navigator on B24 Liberators with Air Command South East Asia. In 1946, he flew with Transport Command, bringing prisoners of war in Asia home to Britain.

After the war, and having completed his degree, in 1950 he gained a PhD on how migratory birds navigate, later publishing the first monograph on this fascinating subject, Bird Navigation (1955). Bird migration continued to fascinate him for the rest of his life, and he lived to see the extraordinary development of tiny GPS transmitters being fixed on birds, allowing ornithologists to follow them on their global journeys in real time.

Following his retirement from the WWT in 1988, a year before Scott's death, Matthews continued to be closely involved in science and conservation. In 1993 he published The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands: its History and Development, the definitive account of his greatest achievement.

He received widespread and well-deserved recognition for his lifetime's work: medals from the RSPB and British Ornithologists' Union, the OBE in 1986, and in 1987 was appointed Officer of the Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He is also immortalised in the scientific name of an obscure species of feather louse discovered on greylag geese: Ornithobius matthewsi.

Matthews was married three times: to Josephine Bilderbeck from 1946 to 1961, to his WWT colleague Dr Janet Kear from 1964 to 1978, and from 1980 to another eminent WWT colleague, Mary Evans. Mary, their two children, and two children from his first marriage survive him.

• Professor Geoffrey Vernon Townsend Matthews, conservation scientist, born 16 June 1923; died 21 January 2013

• This article was amended on 11 February 2013. The original stated that the 2,000 designated wetlands of international importance cover almost 2m hectares, rather than 200m hectares. This has been corrected.

Actor who starred as the troubled pupil in Tea and Sympathy on stage and screen

The actor John Kerr, who has died aged 81, won a Tony award in his first starring role on the Broadway stage, as Tom in Tea and Sympathy in 1953, and subsequently appeared in the 1956 film version directed by Vincente Minnelli. Robert Anderson's play, in which a schoolboy "confesses" to his housemaster's wife that he might be homosexual – only to be seduced out of the notion by the sympathetic listener – was considered so controversial that it was restricted to a "members only" theatrical run in London, and Minnelli's film received an X certificate, despite modification, notably in the suggestion that the housemaster was gay.

Kerr starred as the boy, although by then he was in his 20s. Born in New York, son of the actors Geoffrey Kerr and June Walker, he had already graduated from Harvard, played in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1952 in Bernardine. He made a handsome hero and was superbly matched with Deborah Kerr (no relation) as she dispensed tea and largesse in equal measure. Although the movie was sanitised, the dialogue remained intelligent, the premise timely for the period and the acting exceptional under Minnelli's elegant guidance.

The director had been responsible for Kerr's memorable film debut the year before in The Cobweb. He was cast as a sensitive youngster, a suicidally inclined patient in a psychiatric clinic, who becomes the focus of a dispute between his sympathetic doctor (Richard Widmark) and the clinic's manager (Lillian Gish). Kerr should, after such acclaim, have embarked on a major career. But he trod water in television dramas such as Playhouse 90 and movies including Gaby (1956, opposite Leslie Caron), a poor reworking of Waterloo Bridge, and The Vintage (1957), a preposterous thriller set in a French vineyard.

There was an upturn when he took the role of the tragic Lt Cable in the lavish – though stodgy – version of the musical South Pacific (1958). Although his voice was dubbed (by Bill Lee), he had the great number Younger Than Springtime to mime to and looked suitably dashing in his white uniform. The movie was a critical failure, but it gave Kerr a wider audience than Girl of the Night and The Crowded Sky (both 1960) and The Seven Women from Hell (1961).

He was temporarily rescued from the doldrums by Roger Corman's flamboyantly gothic The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), in which he became the torture victim of an insane Vincent Price. That cult movie signalled Kerr's exodus from the big screen and he moved permanently to television, playing stalwart establishment characters. He was presciently cast as an assistant district attorney in the TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-64) and given the top job as District Attorney John Fowler in Peyton Place (1965-66), moving on to an even steamier series, playing Duane Galloway in The Long, Hot Summer (1965). During this period he returned to his studies, graduating in law from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1969 and setting up a practice in California.

Despite his new occupation, Kerr returned sporadically to acting, appearing in television series including The Young Lawyers, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story and The Invisible Man. He also enjoyed key roles in mini-series such as Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) and television movies including Incident on a Dark Street, in which he was again cast as a lawyer. He effectively retired from acting in the late 70s; although he could be glimpsed in the television movie The Park is Mine in 1986.

He is survived by his second wife, Barbara; a son, Michael, and two daughters, Rebecca and Jocelyn, from his first marriage; and seven grandchildren.

Ronald Bergan writes: In 1994, while researching a biography of Anthony Perkins, I interviewed John Kerr at his law office in Beverly Hills. He was 63 and grey-haired, but had kept his slim figure and his handsome, sensitive face.

Initially, Kerr and Perkins had parallel lives and careers. They both attended Miss Carden's private school in New York. They both came from theatrical families – Perkins's father, Osgood, was a well-known Broadway actor, and Kerr's grandfather (Frederick Kerr), father and mother were all actors.

When Perkins and Kerr were in their early 20s, their paths crossed again. In July 1953, Perkins put himself up for the role of Tom Lee in Tea and Sympathy. Kerr was also up for the part. Perkins was confident that the play's director Elia Kazan, who had acted with Osgood, would value him as his father's son. Yet Anderson and Kazan opted for Kerr. "Jack Kerr had the quality we were looking for," explained Anderson. "The very thing that had worked for Tony, particularly in the movies – a certain 'differentness' – we didn't want at the outset for Tom Lee."

Nevertheless, when the Broadway cast was changed a year later, Kerr told Kazan that he believed Perkins had the right qualities to replace him in the role. When Tea and Sympathy reopened starring Joan Fontaine and the unknown Perkins, Kerr was relieved. "My hunch was justified when I saw Tony. He was excellent," Kerr remarked generously. "Tony played it with more humour than I did."

But it was Kerr who was given the part for Minnelli's bowdlerised screen version after the play closed in June 1955. A year later, the tables were turned. Kerr had wanted the part of Gary Cooper's son in William Wyler's Friendly Persuasion, but his agent advised against it. The film launched Perkins as a film star; while Kerr went on to appear in several stinkers.

Kerr also turned down the choice role of Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St Louis, because, he explained, "the American hero was sympathetic to Nazi Germany". He had no regrets, and seemed very relaxed and content in his choice of having given up acting for the law.

• John Grinham Kerr, actor and lawyer, born 15 November 1931; died 2 February 2013

Jazz trumpeter with the Chris Barber band whose playing style was described as 'high-spirited, crisp and clear'

The career of the jazz trumpeter Pat Halcox, who has died aged 82, was defined by the exceptional length of his musical partnership with the trombonist Chris Barber. Halcox explained the longevity of this relationship in a 2008 interview: "Chris always cared so much about what he was doing, and that's why I stayed with him. I've seen the world, made good friends with wonderful musicians, played for huge crowds in fabulous places. I have to thank Chris for all that."

Described by the critic Max Jones as having a playing style that was "high-spirited, crisp and clear", Halcox enjoyed a half-century tenure with Barber's band. It embraced periods of extraordinary success during the heady days of the trad-jazz boom; frequent tours with star US jazzmen; playing visits to Europe, the US and Australia; film assignments and near-insatiable demand for their recordings and concert performances.

Originally destined to be a research chemist, Halcox, who was born in London, took a trainee laboratory job at Glaxo, in Greenford, and began to study for his exams while pursuing his nascent interest in jazz. He had stumbled on traditional jazz when a record shop counter-hand played him a King Oliver record; he soon fell in with other like-minded enthusiasts. Having started on piano, Halcox transferred his allegiance to the trombone while in the RAF, but when his local friends needed a trumpeter for their amateur band, he changed instruments again, this time permanently. "I thought I'm not going to be left out," he said. "The trumpet wasn't a difficult leap in those early days."

Balancing his growing passion for jazz with his day job – he also played football and hockey for Glaxo – proved to be more of a challenge. As he crammed in as many jazz sessions as he could, he began to fall behind in his studies. "I wasn't getting through any exams and before you know where you are, the music becomes the most important thing to you."

Halcox began to play more and more, sitting in with an early version of Barber's group without anticipating his professional career in jazz. By 1954, Barber's band had begun to prosper, the advent of the cornettist Ken Colyer proving decisive until he decided the band's members were insufficiently committed to his purist viewpoint. Colyer was voted out of the band and Halcox was voted in. He recalled: "[I thought] I'll give it a go until it wears out, but you soon realise it doesn't."

For the next 54 years, Halcox, Barber and the clarinettist Monty Sunshine (whose recording of Petite Fleur propelled the band to even more success) made up a frontline that balanced clear-eyed traditionalism with driving swing. Early on, Halcox had wedded himself to the strict New Orleans style; later, he broadened his tastes as the band widened its repertoire and toured with key players from the heyday of US mainstream jazz. Barber's deep understanding of African-American blues and gospel also brought the group into contact with Muddy Waters (they sat in with the bluesman at his Chicago South Side club) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Halcox remembered the UK tour with the ebullient American saxophonist Louis Jordan with pleasure: "Working with Louis Jordan was like being dragged along by wild horses. He went out to enjoy himself and make an impact, which he did."

Known from 1968 as Chris Barber's Jazz and Blues Band, with the excellent blues guitarist John Slaughter as a regular sideman, it had, by 2001, morphed into the Big Chris Barber Band, with added instrumentalists enabling them to play Duke Ellington's 1920s material. While other band members came and went, Halcox stayed on, always playing with luminous elegance, his partnership with Barber at the core of everything they sought to achieve. An excellent short film Momma Don't Allow, co-directed by Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz in 1955, showed the early band in their element, performing to a club full of happy jivers. Other film associations included the soundtrack for the 1959 screen adaptation of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger – Halcox tutored Richard Burton in how to mime the trumpet and dubbed his playing – and a brief appearance in 1962 by Halcox and a small group in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

As the band began to spend more time touring in Europe – they were especially popular in Germany – the travelling took its toll and at the age of 78 Halcox retired. He continued to play and front occasional bands of friends and sometimes returned to guest with Barber.

Halcox was innately modest and always anxious to stress how lucky he had been to enjoy so fruitful a career. He is survived by his wife, Shirley, and their son, Julian.

• Patrick John Halcox, jazz trumpeter, born 18 March 1930; died 4 February 2013

Photographer celebrated for his informal portraits of artists, actors and musicians

David Farrell, who has died aged 93, was known primarily for his photographic portraits of the most prominent artists, actors, authors and, particularly, musicians of his time. These ranged from classical performers such as Yehudi Menuhin, Ravi Shankar and Jacqueline du Pré to Louis Armstrong, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He would take his portable darkroom with him to filming locations, where he photographed Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, among others. His main body of work dates from the mid-1950s to the 1980s, by which time he was working primarily in cinema, but he continued with his photography well into the digital age.

Taking Henri Cartier-Bresson's "humanitarian" photography as his model, Farrell specialised in taking portraits in informal situations – he preferred to photograph artists at home or in the studio, rather than in performance – and imitated the French genius's famed "invisibility". Paul Scofield said that Farrell was the one photographer "who never intruded", and John Gielgud, on seeing Farrell's portrait of him, asked: "David, where were you? I didn't know you were there!" Menuhin, whom he met at the Bath Music festival in 1955 (and at whose music school he first photographed Nigel Kennedy, at the age of 11) became another friend for life: he claimed that Farrell created the visual equivalent of his own musical achievements.

Farrell was born in Dulwich, south London, and was supported by his grandfather, who led the life of a rentier and gave his occupation as "gentleman". David's father, who travelled for a British electricity company, was in his 50s and working in Nigeria when he contracted malaria, from which he died when David was 21. David's mother was passionate about music and took him to violin lessons from the age of three. As he grew up, his musical talent consumed a major part of his life; he attended Manor House and Dulwich schools, then won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, studying under Max Rostal.

The second world war interrupted Farrell's studies and in 1940 he enlisted in the RAF, spending the next five years as a pilot officer with Bomber Command. In 1942 he married his teenage sweetheart, Joyce Manning, an amateur singer and a great supporter of his playing, despite the difficulties of his making a living. As their family grew – they had five children over 10 years – Farrell decided to leave his career as a solo violinist to become a self-taught photographer. The family moved to rural Gloucestershire and Farrell was obliged, in his daughter Cassie's words, "to photograph a lot of rich people's kids, and the whole hunting fraternity. He became very in demand among the county set."

There was, however, another social set, composed partly of weekend visitors, which included the sculptors Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi, the scientist and author Jacob Bronowski, the economist Leopold Kohr and the playwright Peter Nichols, who all became close friends. Through them, Farrell found work with the National Theatre and the Tate Gallery in London.

He maintained his love of music and never expressed bitterness at the sacrifice of his first career. Instead, he performed informally whenever he could, sometimes with the musicians and composers he met, but mostly in duets and string quartets with the younger generations. His son-in-law, John Adams, became his piano accompanist. "Farrell was no prima donna," says Adams. "He had a human quality that meant he always played to the other musician's level, even if it was that of a 10-year-old child. His favourite form of relaxation was family concerts."

He was intrigued by all the arts. In 1964 he returned to the Bath festival to photograph Margot Fonteyn dancing with Rudolf Nureyev. That day, it transpired, Fonteyn was informed that her husband had been shot in Panama. In the evening, Nureyev declared himself in need of a drink and the two men stopped at the Roman baths on their way to a pub. A cleaner admitted them in return for Nureyev's signature, and Farrell obtained iconic images of the dancer, shot in available light, moodily staring into the watery stone cisterns.

The Farrell family returned to West Hampstead during the swinging 60s, and Farrell photographed the popular singers, including Adam Faith, Petula Clark, Helen Shapiro and Tom Jones, who appeared on early TV music programmes such as Top of the Pops. He worked for London Weekend and Thames Television, providing stills and working as a cameraman. In 1968 he photographed Peter Hall's film of A Midsummer Night's Dream (with David Warner, Diana Rigg and Helen Mirren), and in 1970 he shot Hall's stage version, followed by his film of King Lear, set in windswept Jutland, with Scofield in the title role.

Through the 70s and 80s, Farrell worked on more than 100 feature films and TV dramas, alongside directors including Ken Loach, Blake Edwards and Michael Winner. These exceptional projects included Moustapha Akkad's Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976), filmed in the Libyan desert with Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. On one commission he captured the last footage of Peter Sellers, fooling around while shooting an advert (which was never used) for Barclays bank in Ireland.

Farrell insisted on doing all his own printing, with Joyce ably assisting the cropping and retouching. While he retained a preference for black-and-white photography, he happily transferred sections of his back catalogue online, and began using a digital camera in his 80s. For the first time, he found himself on the other side of a camera when Cassie began making videos of him, recounting the stories of his lifetime. "He had so many anecdotes, he never needed to repeat himself," she says. "Dad was no David Bailey, although he took many of the same subjects. The problem was that he was no salesman."

He was also no reliable archivist, leaving behind rooms filled with boxes of original prints. On one rare occasion of a clearout, he filled bin bags, mistakenly throwing out his early Beatles pictures. They were duly removed by the dustmen.

Although he found time for few exhibitions during his busy and productive life, Farrell's considerable collection is now mainly shared between the Getty and Lebrecht archives. In recent years, small shows were mounted in Bristol, at the Barbican, in London, and in Bath (2009); there remains much more to be seen.

Farrell is survived by Joyce; two daughters; and two of his three sons.

• David Farrell, photographer, born 28 August 1919; died 3 January 2013

Award-winning film editor who had an instinctive feel for pace, rhythm and nuance

Gerry Hambling, who has died aged 86, was one of the finest editors that the British film industry has produced. He was widely admired, particularly by his peers, for films such as Midnight Express (1978), Mississippi Burning (1988), In the Name of the Father (1993) and Evita (1996). He won many awards from the editors' guilds in the US and UK, which made up for the fact that, although he was nominated six times, an Oscar always eluded him. He did, however, win the Bafta three times for film editing. My own collaboration with Gerry went back 40 years, as he cut 14 feature films for me, as well as three short films and scores of commercials.

As with many film technicians of his generation, Gerry's choice of profession was serendipitous: born and raised in Croydon, Surrey, he left school at 16 and went to work at the local factory, except, in his case, the factory was Pinewood Studios, where he worked as an editor's apprentice. His contemporary at the studio was another doyen of British film editing, Anne Coates, who used to give him a lift to the studios in her small car.

Gerry worked as a sound editor on Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) and King & Country (1964) and cut his teeth as a film editor on British comedies such as The Bulldog Breed (1960), starring Norman Wisdom. But as the British film industry went into slow motion and then prolonged pause at the end of the 60s, Hambling, like many great technicians, found himself out of work. The scraps handed out by the production managers and directors in the Pinewood bar didn't come his way. Gerry, a proud man and not overly sociable, was not a recipient of this largesse and so, prompted by an old editor friend, Roger Cherrill, joined Cherrill's post-production company in central London, in the nascent world of television commercials.

Gerry later told me that after agreeing to join Cherrill's, he walked into Soho Square and sitting on a bench, head in hands, thought that his career was surely over. But Gerry's misgivings were my good fortune as I, and my producer, Alan Marshall, had just started our TV commercials company and walked into the cutting room of this polite, but curmudgeonly and, if truth be told, rather resentful editor, who thought that he was slumming it a bit in Soho's advertising back streets. Watching him work was a revelation to me, and a process that I never failed to be impressed by, in the next 30 years we spent working together.

With white glove on one hand, grease pencil in the other, he hunched over the old Moviola editing machine, his strong hands a blur as he stopped its motion with his right hand, feeding in the film with the other and then suddenly snatching it into the air, snapping closed the film-joiner and smashing down the mini-guillotine with his knuckles. The sheer physical prowess belied the extraordinary delicate nature of his cuts, which were always accurate to a single sprocket: the merest sliver of celluloid. No one has yet worked out a digital system to replicate, or better, the finesse of Gerry's editing.

We collaborated on films including Bugsy Malone (1976), Midnight Express, Fame (1980), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), Birdy (1984), Angel Heart (1987) and The Commitments (1991). I never sat on his shoulder, guiding the cut, until he had made his contribution – and then we would discuss it. I never failed to marvel at his skills. Film schools analyse his kinetic work in Pink Floyd – The Wall or Mississippi Burning, but it was also in the more delicate, dramatic scenes that he excelled. The ability to understand the essence of a script and the subtlety of an actor's performance; the intuitive sense of how long to hang on to a shot; the magical, decisive moment on when to cut; the instinctive understanding of pace, rhythm and nuance, that makes a scene sing: makes it soar. That was his genius.

Gerry also did wonderful work for other directors. He cut In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997) for Jim Sheridan, Another Country (1984) for Marek Kanievska, White Squall (1996) for Ridley Scott, City of Joy (1992) for Roland Joffé, and Absolute Beginners (1996) for Julien Temple, which brought him a further cluster of "best editor" nominations.

In 1998 he received an ACE (American Cinema Editors) lifetime achievement award. Gerry was famously mean with his money and at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles, when I teased him about his parsimony, he promptly showed the audience his legendary money belt – where he stashed his per diems – curiously attached to his ankle.

Even as the digital age dawned, Gerry resolutely stuck with his Moviola and film. His common practice was to have not one, but two upright Moviolas in front of him, which he grabbed, yanked and tamed like two bucking broncos. Gerry and Steven Spielberg's editor, Michael Kahn, were the last two editors to cut major feature films physically on celluloid film.

A French journalist once asked me if I used the modern editing techniques. I answered that I had a secret device that I found infallible: an old, old man with a grey beard. At one end I fed in film, per diems and single-malt whisky, and at the other end out came an immaculately cut film. Gerry said he was too old to change to computerised editing and so decided to retire in 2003, although all of us were urging him to carry on.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret, daughter, Belinda, and son, Robert.

• Gerald Hambling, film editor, born 14 June 1926; died 5 February 2013