Few people are able to start, two years after the usual retirement age, a new career which makes them better known than anything they did in their past life, but Bill Waddington, who died on September 9th aged 84, was one such. Aged 67 and living alone after the death of his wife the actress and singer Lilian Day, he received a phone call in 1983 that was to change his life. He was asked to play Percy Sugden, the cantankerous pensioner in Granada TV's long-running soap Coronation Street.
Percy Sugden arrived as the caretaker of the community centre, but was soon poking his nose into everyone's business on the pretext of looking after their welfare. His instinct for snooping found a perfect outlet in the Street's community watch scheme.
A former chef in the Royal Army Catering Corps, Percy Sugden would remind people that he had "made gravy under gunfire". He held forth in his pompous way on all manner of subjects, and took mortal offence if anybody presumed to question his word. He was decidedly close with money.
After being forced to retire from the community centre, Percy Sugden became a lollipop man. But disaster struck when, in attempting to save Phyllis Pearse from being run over by a car, he was hit himself.
He nursed a tendresse for Emily Bishop, a widow who out of pure kindheartedness took him in as a lodger at No 3 Coronation Street. His bossy ways helped to drive her into a nervous breakdown in 1992.
He had a "soft spot" for the cantankerous Maud Grimes, and rashly volunteered that she would make a wonderful wife - a remark she took as a proposal of marriage.
After the initial shock, Percy Sugden went along with the notion, until Maud persuaded him to take her and her daughter Maureen to Normandy for the 50th anniversary of D-Day. When they visited the American cemetery Maud pointed to the grave of an American serviceman, and told her daughter that he was her real father. Percy, who saw such behaviour as the supreme betrayal of "our lads away fighting for their country", broke off the engagement.
Bill Waddington was born in the middle of the first World War - and almost in the middle of the lunchtime drinks his mother was serving in a pub in Oldham. She went upstairs to have her son, rather to the irritation of his over-worked father who was managing the premises. Expelled from his first school for being unruly, and expelled from Oldham parish church choir at the age of 10 for pinching two bananas from the harvest festival display, Bill Waddington went to grammar school. He left at 14 after being described as "the clown for the class".
An admirer of the comedian George Formby, he had mastered the ukelele and became an entertainer in the army's Blue Pencils concert party.
He wrote his own comedy routines. These were well received by the radio critics when the BBC broadcast excerpts. Soon he was billed as "the army's top comic".
After the war he continued his career as a stand-up comedian and character actor, topping the bill at the Royal Variety Performance in 1955. His agent was Lew Grade, who became the boss of ATV, one of the first ITV companies in Britain. He appeared with top calibre artists like Lena Horne and Frankie Laine, did a Royal Variety Performance, ran a Rolls Royce, bought a farm, failed as a pig rearer, but succeeded as a breeder of racehorses at the stud he owned in Shropshire.
Bill Waddington joined Coronation Street at a time when it was turning to younger characters, and represented the older generation, becoming the archtypal grumpy pensioner. He was even thrilled when Percy Sugden's grumpiness won him the title, through a tabloid newspaper poll, of the third most hated person on TV, after JR of Dallas and Alexis of Dynasty.
His character left the Street to move to a care home in 1997 after he reportedly objected to the soap's ever-more racy storylines.
Bill Waddington was married four times. His first marriage to Evelyn Case in 1939 did not survive the war. His second marriage to Lilian Day lasted for 32 years until her death in 1980. They had two daughters, Anne and Barbara. After Lilian's death he married Irene, briefly, and then, in 1995, Sheila Tory, who survives him.
Bill Waddington: born 1916; died, September 2000