The actor George Cole, who has died aged 90, was most effective in two sorts of role: the exploiter and the exploited. He is likely to be remembered chiefly as the dodgy used car dealer Arthur Daley in the popular television series Minder (1979-94), always on the lookout for a “nice little earner”. But at the beginning of his acting career he was most often seen as the reverse: a wide-eyed and wobbly-lipped boyish acolyte of sometimes sinister manipulators in plays such as Mr Bolfry, Dr Angelus and The Anatomist; or a doleful young serviceman trying to keep his courage up in war films that included Morning Departure (1950), the story of trapped submariners.
Cole always protested that he had no ambition and would cheerfully have carried on playing for ever the first part he ever acted. This was only half the story, for from his early years he showed a tenacious fascination with entertainment that lasted a lifetime. Born in Tooting, south-west London, the adopted son (who learned he was adopted when he was 13) of a Tooting council employee, George, and a cleaner, Florence, Cole went to secondary school in Morden, where he distinguished himself by entertaining his pals with bawdy songs he had heard on the radio and getting into the cheaper seats at Wimbledon theatre.
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