Ray Brooks was a jobbing actor living with his wife in a £4-a-week flat when he was given the part of a lifetime. It was 1966 and on a recent trip to Manchester he had befriended a man called Mike King whose wife, Carol White, had just landed the lead role in Ken Loach’s new television drama Cathy Come Home. The Brookses were invited over for dinner, where Ray took a shine to their two children, Sean and Stevie, who were to star as Cathy’s children in the show. Carol suggested Brooks play her husband. “Her children had got to know me,” Brooks said, “and she thought they would feel more relaxed in my company.”

Written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Loach, Cathy Come Home, the story of a young couple’s descent into homelessness and poverty, was watched by 12 million people and pricked the national conscience. Reg, a truck driver, and his wife Cathy cut forlorn figures as he loses his job, they lose their home and by the end their children are taken away. 

There was very little dialogue and it was a masterclass in improvisation — “like playing jazz”, said Brooks. When Cathy and Reg were looking for a place to stay, the actors would turn up in Camden Town and answer real flat-to-let adverts. Brooks would ring the bell and say they were looking for a room. “The woman would take one look at Carol’s bump — which was a pillow up her coat — and say: ‘Oh, no, we can’t have children.’ Then we’d go back and say we were making a film and could we use the footage if we gave them a tenner

For Brooks, a 27-year-old actor hitherto best known for The Knack, Cathy Come Home proved a blessing and a curse. It brought him sudden fame but his career failed to kick on. “Like many other actors,” he said, “I’d had my head above the parapet a few times and it would never stay up there for too long.” Years later, despite good work on television and the stage, Cathy Come Home would still be the most important entry on his CV and the part which more than any other defined him. 

He said later that he had been naive. “I thought casting directors would come to me. But although people did offer me work, very often the films did not materialise because they couldn’t get the money together. And actually, I don’t think I was ever that good an actor. I was more of an image as a young man.” And with contemporaries including David Hemmings and Terence Stamp, he admitted there was a lot of competition.

Raymond Michael Brooks was born in Brighton in 1939, the illegitimate son of a bus conductress who had fallen pregnant after a fling with a young soldier called John Brooks — a fact Ray found out only aged 20, though a paternity test proved inconclusive. His mother took him to variety theatres across Brighton’s seafront and, thinking he had a better chance of getting on in life if he spoke well, sent him for elocution lessons. “She wanted better for me,” he said. 

Brooks took acting classes, got into amateur dramatics and gave up his office job with the local bus company, writing to countless repertory companies and eventually securing a part in Treasure Island at Nottingham. In 1960 he moved into television with a small part in a BBC drama, The Secret Kingdom, and early films included HMS Defiant, Play It Cool with the pop singer Billy Fury andSome People, in which he had second billing, after Kenneth More, as a troubled teenage factory worker who is shown how to mend his ways

There was a short stint in Coronation Street (1964) and then his first notable film, The Knack, a slice of swinging Sixties London directed by Richard Lester, who had just made A Hard Day’s Night with the Beatles. Brooks played the enigmatic Tolen, a womaniser with a taste for sharp suits and Thelonius Monk records who is asked by Michael Crawford’s schoolteacher to pass on the “knack” of picking up “birds”. Made on a modest budget, the film recovered its cost many times over and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. 

In 1966, the year of Cathy Come Home, Brooks had a good role in Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 AD, a cinema spin-off from Doctor Who. Cathy had the greater impact, but not for Brooks. He was seldom out of work in the years that followed but instead of getting lead roles, he had to make do with guest spots on series such as The Avengers, Softly Softly, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Z Cars and Doomwatch.

He told children’s stories on Jackanory, narrated the children’s animated series Mr Benn, played Yasha in The Cherry Orchard in a BBC Play of the Month production and also Giorgio, the waiter in a decrepit hotel, in Carry On Abroadin 1972. But the 1970s were a difficult time and he was forced to look for other outlets. He wrote songs and produced an album, but there were few takers and with a young family to support he was relieved to be offered voice-over work on television commercials. Among many others, he was the voice of Flora margarine and a London car dealer with a tag line: “Nice people to do business with”. But for the voice-overs, he said, he might have given up acting.

He returned, with some success, to the theatre. In 1974 he was in Charles Laurence’s play, Snap, at the Vaudeville Theatre with Maggie Smith, directed by Bill Gaskill, followed by the London premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absent Friends, with Richard Briers and Peter Bowles, which had a long run at the Garrick. In 1979 he was in CP Taylor’s And a Nightingale Sang (Queen’s) with Patricia Routledge and Gemma Jones. In 1981 he joined the National Theatre forOn the Razzle, Tom Stoppard’s farce based on a play by Johann Nestroy, supporting Felicity Kendal, Dinsdale Landen and Michael Kitchen

The 1980s were better. He played a doctor in the PD James whodunit Death of an Expert Witness, and in 1984 got his best opportunity since Cathy as Robby Box, the loveable, luckless, cockney card player in the comedy-drama Big Deal, which ran for 30 episodes and made his character into a working-class hero. Soon after it finished he starred in the ITV sitcom Running Wild as a 45-year-old trying unsuccessfully to return to his Teddy Boy youth. He was reunited with Sharon Duce, his co-star on Big Deal, in the BBC comedy Growing Pains, about the travails of middle-aged foster parents.

In 2005, white-haired and balding where once he sported a prominent dark quiff, he joined EastEnders as Joe Macer, who marries the long-suffering Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard). But in his final appearance in January 2007 Joe confesses to killing Pauline on Christmas Day before falling from a window to his death. Brooks later voiced his disenchantment with the show, criticising its “shabby sets and poor scripts” and lack of rehearsal time and admitting that his relationship with Richard had broken down.

When Brooks married his wife, Sadie (née Elcombe), in 1961, he was appearing in a television drama and the suit and shoes he wore for the registry office ceremony belonged to the BBC. His daughter, Emma, a social worker, died of cancer in 2003. His sons, Will and Tom, survive him. 

Brooks was shy of the limelight and on occasion lacked confidence. He recalled in the first few pages of his autobiography that the actress Miriam Margolyes had once told him: “The trouble with you, Ray, is that you don’t like yourself and you’re ill-educated.” He loved Fulham FC — in the 1980s he was among the celebrity fans to fight against the club’s proposed merger with QPR, wearing a “Save Fulham” badge during an interview on Wogan — and he wrote two novels

Though he was most proud of his work on Cathy Come Home he would perhaps be best known for Mr Benn, a 13-episode cartoon about a bowler hat-wearing gentleman who finds himself in a new adventure every episode by dressing up in a magical costume shop. People continually asked him to say the catchphrase, “As if by magic!” He reckoned his voice resonated with the public because it sounded so comforting and sincere. His secret, he said, was smoking Old Holborn tobacco and drinking “lots of beer”. 

Ray Brooks, actor, was born on April 20, 1939. He died of the effects of dementia on August 9, 2025, aged 86