British-Canadian actor-director Barry Morse, best known as the police detective in hot pursuit of David Janssen's Dr. Richard Kimble in the TV series The Fugitive, has died in England at the age of 89.
Morse died at University College hospital in London on Saturday, his son, actor Hayward Morse, told The Canadian Press in an interview from Great Britain Monday.
He said his father was taken there last Wednesday after he began experiencing blackouts and was falling down.
“He was in hospital for three days before he died. So in the long term, he was in his own home up until three days before he died, which I think is pretty good,” said Hayward Morse.
“He was 89 years old and that's a good long life. He'd accomplished a lot of things,” he said.
Morse had been living in London for a number of years, but had travelled to Canada and the United States to work, where his list of credits was impressive. The versatile actor, who had played everyone from Macbeth to Hollywood gangsters, had worked until a few years ago, but was still active in the (George Bernard) Shaw Society of England, which he was president of, and chaired society meetings as recently last week.
Morse established himself in London theatrical circles before emigrating to Canada with his wife and two children in 1951 and the family obtained Canadian citizenship. Hayward Morse said his late mother, actress Sydney Sturgess, had strong ties to Canada and persuaded Barry Morse to make the move.
Morse's career spanned seven decades and his website estimates he played more than 3,000 roles on radio, television, stage and in film. It was a long way from the two-dollars-a-week messenger boy that he started out as a young teen — and Bethnal Green, a slum district of London where he was born 100 per cent Cockney.
His son said his father didn't really have a preference between film or stage or television.
Morse, who was the youngest candidate to be accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, appeared on Broadway in Hide and Seek, Salad Days and the lead of Frederick William Rolfe in Hadrian VII among his numerous stage credits. He was also briefly an artistic director at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. in 1966.
Morse joined the CBC in the early 1950s and worked for the public broadcaster in Montreal and Toronto. He soon developed a reputation as being the busiest man in television. He wrote, narrated and produced his half-hour CBC Radio series, A Touch of Greasepaint, which ran for 14 years. He also appeared in Barry Morse Presents on television.
“He was instrumental in the very, very beginnings of the CBC on television, and just really the beginnings of Canadian television, he was there,” said Robert E. Wood, an artist who co-authored Morse's autobiography Remember With Advantages — Chasing ‘The Fugitive' and Other Stories from an Actor's Life.
“There was a time when he was filming so many things for the CBC and Canadian television in general that he was referred to by a couple of TV critics as CBC's test pattern, that they would just throw him on when they had nothing else to air,” said Wood from his home in Calgary.
Looking back on his early days in Canada, Barry Morse once said in an interview “There was a sense of adventure...a willingness to experiment and try anything.”
Morse was also the first actor at the CBC to demand and get pay that was higher than the minimum scale.
In 1963, Morse was hired by producer Quinn Martin to play Lieut. Philip Gerard on The Fugitive — a series that ran four seasons and 120 episodes.
