Early Life
George Edward Cole was born on April 22, 1925, in Tooting, London, and adopted at ten days old by George and Florence Cole, a council worker and a cleaner.
He left Morden Secondary School at fourteen and went to work as a butcher's boy. At fifteen he got his film debut in the wartime thriller 'Cottage to Let' (1941). National service interrupted the run: he was in the Royal Air Force from 1943 to 1947.
After the war the character actor Alastair Sim took him on, and Cole and his mother lived in Sim's house. Sim coached him hard and helped him lose the broad Cockney accent.
Early Career & First Roles
Cole made ten films in the post-war years. He worked in drama, like the RAF film 'Journey Together' (1943), and in thrillers such as 'The Spider and the Fly' (1949). In 'Scrooge' (1951) he played the young Ebenezer opposite Alastair Sim.
Comedy gave him his first lasting character. As the spivvy, trench-coated wide boy 'Flash Harry' in the 'St Trinian's' films, starting with 'The Belles of St Trinian's' (1954), Cole showed what he could do with a charming rogue.
Major Roles
Two roles define his career. One is a fixture of British film comedy, the other a central figure in British television drama.
Arthur Daley – Minder (1979–1994)
To discuss British television crime drama of the 1980s is to speak of Arthur Daley in Minder. For fifteen years, George Cole embodied this character so completely that the actor and the role became inseparable in the public consciousness. Arthur was not a gangster, but a "businessman" operating in the grey markets of London, a purveyor of "merchandise of a varied nature" and "a nice little earner."
Cole played him as a set of contradictions. Arthur was a wheedling optimist, forever on the verge of the big score, and forever undone by his own cheapness and bad judgment. The camel-hair coat and trilby were a uniform of would-be respectability. The shifty eyes and the fast patter gave away the chancer underneath.
Despite the endless scheming and the way he used his long-suffering "minder," Terry McCann (Dennis Waterman), Arthur was never a villain. Cole gave him a childlike need for approval and a fear of failure. You laughed at his cheek, groaned at his mistakes, and occasionally felt sorry for him.
Arthur Daley's phrases entered the language. His talk of a "nice little earner," his references to his unseen wife "'Er Indoors," the euphemisms for dodgy deals, all of it became part of the national dialogue. Cole played him as a bundle of nervous energy, from the hunched shoulders and quick glances of a man expecting a tap on the shoulder to the wide, confident gestures of a man who believes he has just closed the deal of a lifetime.
It was also social observation. Arthur Daley was a product of Thatcher's Britain, a man working the angles as the country changed around him. Cole's playing of him made Arthur Daley one of the best-loved characters British television has produced.
Flash Harry – St Trinian's (1954–1966)
Long before Arthur Daley was selling suspect video recorders, Cole had the loveable rogue down as Flash Harry. In the St Trinian's films, where schoolgirls ran gambling rings and the chemistry lab doubled as a distillery, Flash Harry was the outsider who supplied everyone, the spiv.
Pencil moustache, loud check suit, permanent slouch. Flash Harry was the school's unofficial and deeply untrustworthy supplier and fixer, working out of the railway arch and dealing in black-market nylons, tip-offs and whatever else turned a quick profit. His scenes with Alastair Sim, playing both headmistress Miss Fritton and her bookie brother, were the best in the films.
Cole played him understated and sly, delivering his lines in a rapid, confidential mutter, as if every transaction was a state secret. The ingratiating smiles and the readiness to bolt showed a man living on his wits. Flash Harry had no grand ambitions, only the next opportunity, and Cole made his total lack of scruples endearing.
The timing was exact, and the duplicity came out funny and oddly honourable. Flash Harry set the pattern for the charming chancer that Cole would later take much further with Arthur Daley.
Other Notable Work
Cole worked across mediums. He played the hapless David Bliss in 'A Life of Bliss' on radio from 1953, and on television in 1960 and 1961. In the BBC adaptation of Tom Sharpe's 'Blott on the Landscape' (1985) he was Sir Giles Lynchwood, all pompous bluster. He did a guest spot as the bank manager in 'The Good Life'.
His film work kept going with comedies like 'Too Many Crooks', and he narrated 'Jackanory' for children's BBC.
Acting Style
George Cole was a character actor in the old sense: a working professional rather than a star. He never seemed to be acting. He seemed to be living in the part, which made even Flash Harry believable.
He was good at moral ambiguity. Cole played men who worked in grey areas and gave you their reasoning, so you understood the chancer even while you disapproved of him. He did it with small things: a shift of the eyes, a change of pace in the voice, one mannerism.
His comic timing came from understatement rather than a big performance. He knew the funniest moment is often a character taking a ridiculous situation completely seriously, and he could carry real weight the same way, quietly.
Personal Life
Away from the cameras George Cole kept a private, settled life. He married twice, first to actress Eileen Moore, then in 1967 to actress Penny Morrell, and that marriage lasted until his death. He had four children, including the screenwriter Cris Cole. For over seventy years he lived in the village of Stoke Row, Oxfordshire. He preferred quiet to showbusiness glamour.
In 1992 he was appointed OBE for services to drama. His autobiography, 'The World Was My Lobster', came out in 2013, and he died on August 5, 2015, aged 90, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading.
In closing...
George Cole worked for over sixty years and is remembered for two characters: the spiv Flash Harry and Arthur Daley. He was a professional who turned up, knew his job and made the chancer understandable and funny. That is why the work still holds up.