1. Rodney Bewes was born in Bingley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to Horace, an Eastern Electricity Board showroom clerk, and Bessie, who was a teacher of children with learning difficulties.
18 Facts About Rodney Bewes
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Rodney Bewes's family lived for a few years in the Crossflatts district of Bingley, before they moved to Luton, where he attended Stopsley Secondary School.
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Rodney Bewes's illness receded, and the family eventually returned to the north.
4.
Rodney Bewes was working nights in hotels, doing the washing-up, to finance his studies at RADA during the day, and hence was frequently to be found asleep in class.
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Rodney Bewes began appearing in repertory theatre and obtained parts in the television drama series Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars.
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Rodney Bewes appeared in the film version of Billy Liar as Arthur Crabtree, alongside his close friend Tom Courtenay.
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Rodney Bewes starred in his own ITV sitcom Dear Mother.
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Rodney Bewes appeared in the 1969 theatrical production of She Stoops to Conquer as Tony Lumpkin.
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Rodney Bewes appeared in the film Spring and Port Wine which starred James Mason, and played the Knave of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
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Rodney Bewes remained active as a stage performer in the 1990s and later with one-man versions of Three Men in a Boat and Diary of a Nobody, both of which shows he toured extensively in the UK.
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Rodney Bewes was back in Edinburgh again in 2015 for an autobiographical show, An Audience with Rodney Bewes.
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However, they had comprehensively fallen out when Rodney Bewes indiscreetly related a personal anecdote about Bolam in a 1976 press interview, and they had not spoken since.
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Rodney Bewes blamed Bolam's fear of having his privacy invaded, and of being eternally typecast, leading to his refusing to allow repeats of The Likely Lads.
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The final breach, said Rodney Bewes, occurred when, having told an anecdote about the birth of his own triplets, he followed on with a story of how Bolam's wife, actress Susan Jameson, had told him she was pregnant while he was driving, and he almost crashed the car.
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Rodney Bewes repeated this story, thinking it was already public knowledge; but then, on realising he might have crossed a line, phoned Bolam to forewarn him of the article, and got a frosty reaction.
16.
In 2010, Rodney Bewes claimed his former co-star had refused to allow The Likely Lads to be repeated on network television, preventing him from earning anything from the repeats; "He must be very wealthy; me, I've just got an overdraft and a mortgage".
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Rodney Bewes died on 21 November 2017, six days before his 80th birthday, in his seaside home at Cadgwith in south Cornwall.
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Rodney Bewes is survived by a daughter and three sons.