Norman Eshley was painting the “No Smoking” sign at the Bristol Old Vic one day in 1967 when his agent called to say that Orson Welles wanted to meet him in Madrid. The summons came out of the blue. Eshley was 21 and working as an assistant stage manager while making his way as a thespian with whatever parts he could snag. Seemingly someone — he never found out who — had told Welles of his youthful promise and the great man wanted him to audition for his film The Immortal Story.Based on a short story by Karen Blixen, the film had only four parts and Welles had already cast himself, Jeanne Moreau and the French actor Roger Coggio in three of the roles. Eshley’s audition to make up the foursome playing a young Danish sailor was typically unconventional. After a day’s delay while Welles recovered from a bender, the “audition” when they finally met consisted mostly of a dispute about the merit of the plays of Jean Anouilh, which Welles disparaged and Eshley defended. He had been told that the director hated “yes” men and so took up cudgels with energetic vigour.

When the argument had exhausted itself, Welles “started laughing and pushed a bell under his desk. Some staff came in and he said: ‘Give the guy some dough, let him go see the town.’ ”

With his hair dyed blond, he spent his first day filming a scene in bed with Moreau during which he became deeply embarrassed when he “rose to the occasion”, as he put it. 

By the time they filmed the main sex scene, Moreau had returned to Paris and her footage was filmed there and intercut with her earlier scene shot with Eshley in Madrid. “The first time I’d had sex and we were 356 miles apart,” he observed wryly.

Welles, who had only daughters and had always wanted a son, took such a shine to Eshley that he offered to adopt him. Eshley was flattered but turned down an invitation to live with Welles and his family at his Spanish home in Chinchón and returned to Bristol to join the Old Vic company on a world tour, which included a Shakespearean run on Broadway.

The Immortal Story was a spectacular start to a screen career in which he became best known for the 1970s TV sitcom George & Mildred in which he played Jeffrey Fourmile, the stuck-up, Tory-voting estate agent living next door to the Ropers, the married couple in the show’s title played by Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce. Much of the show’s humour came from his class-ridden spats with the Labour-supporting George and he described the three years he spent on the show as “the happiest of my working life”.

The humour was such that at times Eshley and Murphy were unable to keep a straight face. A favourite moment came when the patrician accosted his ne’er- do-well neighbour in the pub and told him he wanted to talk to him about weed in his garden. “Who did?” came the reply. It took several takes before they had a usable recording

He is survived by his third wife, Rachel (née Spiers), whom he married in 2015 after they met in a Bristol wine bar. His previous marriages to the That Was the Week That Was singer Millicent Martin between 1969 and 1973 and to Lynette Braid in the 1980s ended in divorce.

Norman Eshley was born three weeks after VE Day in Bristol, the son of a bank worker. At Bristol Grammar School he came under the tutelage of Bert Payne, an English teacher who produced the school’s plays and cast him in leading roles, often in female parts, which resulted in “a few punch-ups” when he was mocked by classmates for wearing a frock.

Payne recommended him to the National Youth Theatre with whom he spent a season in London, and when he founded the Bristol Youth Theatre Eshley became the company’s leading man, which led to a scholarship at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

After Welles had given him his big break, his first West End appearance came in 1970 in Robert Bolt’s Vivat! Vivat Regina! alongside Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth I and he became a familiar face on television as Lieutenant Bob Last in the BBC naval drama Warship and then in the ITV sitcom Man About the House, in which he played two different parts, first as a sleazy married executive unsuccessfully trying to get Paula Wilcox’s Chrissy into bed and then succeeding as the brother of Richard O’Sullivan’s character Robin Tripp. The show also featured Joyce and Murphy as the squabbling Ropers and the spin-off George &Mildred debuted in 1976 less than six months after Man About the House had gone off air

He continued to work steadily on stage and screen until 1993 when a car in which he was travelling collided with a lorry on a narrow road in the Dordogne. His injuries were horrific and almost cost him his life. They did cost him his stage career. After a lengthy period being put back together in hospital, he tried for a play at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal and found he could not remember his lines.

Unable to work, he was declared insolvent over an unpaid tax bill, and spent years battling with the driver’s insurance company over loss of earnings. “When you’re fighting bureaucracy, it’s like being covered in marshmallow,” he told The Independent in 1998.

He had lost his “bottle” and “mooched around for years”, living back in Bristol with his mother and “drinking too much”. He eventually resumed his TV career on shows such as The Bill, but was unable to return to the stage. He also took up writing, and with Elizabeth Revill in 2021 published his debut novel, a sequel to Dickens’s Oliver Twist, titled The Dreamtime of the Artful Dodger.

Norman Eshley, actor, was born on May 30, 1945. He died of cancer on August 2, 2025, aged 80