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Keith Barron was perhaps best known to a generation of viewers for his roles in the sitcoms Duty Free and Haggard, with his most recent appearance being in the ITV police crime series DCI Banks.
Seldom out of work, which he confessed was a bit “masochistic”, the highly versatile, blue-eyed, Yorkshire-accented Barron played the full gamut of roles from adulterer to police officer with a sprinkling of hard-hitting characters in between in a career spanning over five decades.
He made a number of appearances in landmark British shows including Coronation Street, Doctors, A Touch of Frost, Doctor Who and Casualty. He also hit the big screen with British films Baby Love (1968); The Man Who Had Power Over Women (1970) with Rod Taylor and David Puttnam’s film Melody (1971), before crossing the pond and gaining Hollywood roles in The Land That Time Forgot (1975); and At The Earth’s Core (1976), with Doug McClure and Peter Cushing; and Voyage Of The Damned (1976), alongside Faye Dunaway, Max von Sydow, Orson Welles and James Mason.
Barron admitted, “If I’m out of work, I’m terrible. If I go out, I’m all the time wondering whether the phone’s rung while I’ve been out. And if I sit in waiting for it to ring, I’m like a bear with a sore head wondering why it hasn’t.”
Born in the mining town of Mexborough, north-east of Sheffield, in 1934, Keith Barron was the son of a wholesaler. Expected to enter the family business, Barron had other ideas. He later declared that “if it hadn’t been for the theatre, I would have ended up in jail … I used to drink too much and behave disgracefully.”
After leaving school early, he completed his National Service in the RAF. Upon returning, he began to live his dream; he studied acting at the former Sheffield Playhouse, where he met future wife, the stage designer Mary Pickard.
He later joined the same am-dram group as Brian Blessed and landed his first job at a repertory company in Sheffield, earning the princely sum of £1 a week. He soon married...