Reg Evans

Biography

He started drama while in the Royal Air Force stationed near Oxford, England. After leaving the service studied for two years at the London Academy of Music and Drama, followed by work in repertory theatre. He toured Europe with the New Park Theatre Club and later became its artistic director.

Immigrated to Australia in the 1960s and worked in commercial radio and toured with the Young Elizabethan Players. His many Australian television roles include guest roles in Homicide, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Number 96, Division 4, Spyforce, The Evil Touch, A Time for Love, Behind the Legend, Comedy Playhouse, and The Hour Before My Brother Dies.

Evans' film credits include Mad Dog Morgan (1976), the Station Master in Mad Max (1979), a pirate in The Island (1980), Manganinnie (1980), The Plains of Heaven (1982), Kitty and the Bagman (1983), Strikebound (1984), My Letter to George (1986) and Celia (1989).

After 1980 Evans played regular and recurring roles in several television series. These roles included that of Mr. Cocker in the Australian series of Are You Being Served? (1980), and Keith Purvis in the television police drama Blue Heelers in the 1990s. In 2005 he returned to Blue Heelers for a few episodes, portraying vagrant Bob "Sponge Bob" Spalding.

Evans played the recurring role of scruffy private detective Howard Simmons in Prisoner in 1985. He had played three previous guest roles in Prisoner. These were a colleague at Eddie Cook's electrical firm in 1979, the foreman at the printshop where Bea Smith does her work release in 1982, and as Foxy, an old friend of Lizzie Birdsworth's, in 1983. His final acting role was in the Australian comedy Charlie & Boots which was released in 2009.

Death

Evans and his partner, Angela Brunton, died in the 2009 Victorian bushfires.