Cyril Luckham

Career

Luckham played the White Guardian in the long running science fiction television series Doctor Who. He appeared in The Ribos Operation, the first serial in The Key to Time season, and Enlightenment. In 1965 he played Sir Hugh Archibald-Lake in The Wednesday Play (BBC) Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton. In the 1967 BBC serialisation of The Forsyte Saga, Luckham played Sir Lawrence Mont, father-in-law of Fleur Forsyte. He appeared in an episode of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969), as the villain. Luckham was a familiar face as a character actor in the 1970s: playing The 7th Duke of Marlborough in the 1974 Thames miniseries Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill; the 1978 TV series based on the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton; as the evil psychic Edward Drexel in the 1979 supernatural thriller series The Omega Factor and as the equitable Chair of the school board of Bamfylde in the 1980 Andrew Davies adaptation To Serve Them All My Days. He also portrayed Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the film adaptation of A Man for All Seasons (1966) and the long-suffering Father O'Hara in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. He also played the benevolent grandfather in The Cedar Tree, a series that ran on ATV from 1975 to 1979.

He played the paternalist puppet prime minister in 1971's dialectical dystopian TV drama The Guardians, in which Britain is plunged into a tacit fascist state policed by the ubiquitous Guardians.