Barry Evans

Barry Evans was an English actor born on 18 June 1943 in Guildford, Surrey. His mother, Ruby Evans, was unmarried at the time of his birth, and his father was never identified, though he may have been a Canadian army serviceman stationed in Britain during World War Two. When Ruby became engaged to John Balch, who refused to raise another man's child, Evans was placed first in a residential nursery and then in an orphanage at the age of four. He never saw his mother again. His education took place at boarding schools operated by the Shaftesbury Homes, beginning at Fortescue House School in Twickenham and continuing at Bisley Boys' School in Bisley, Surrey, where his aptitude for acting was recognized early and he regularly took leading roles in school productions. After a brief period living in Yalding, Kent, he relocated to London, having won a John Gielgud Scholarship to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Evans began his professional career with three minor roles in National Theatre productions at the Old Vic during the 1960s, appearing as a Peruvian Indian in Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun, in three small parts in Ostrovsky's The Storm, and as a coffee boy in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. His Broadway work ran from 1963 to 1974 and included appearances in Scapino and Chips With Everything. He also undertook additional theatre work during his career, though he found it rarely proved financially worthwhile.

His film breakthrough came with the lead role in Clive Donner's Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush in 1968, in which he played Jamie McGregor, a teenager struggling to lose his virginity. The film incorporated notable technical innovations in its script, photography, and filming techniques, and its soundtrack featured music by The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. It was selected to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, though the festival was cancelled that year. The production marked the beginning of a lasting friendship between Evans and Donner, and the two collaborated again in 1969 on the historical epic Alfred the Great. That same year, Evans appeared alongside Roddy McDowall in the Journey to the Unknown episode "The Killing Bottle," playing the innocent accomplice of a man plotting to murder his brother for an inheritance.

Television brought Evans his widest recognition. His first significant small-screen role came in the sitcom Doctor in the House, broadcast from 1969 to 1970 and based on Richard Gordon's novels, in which he starred as the young medical student Michael Upton. He followed this with the sequel series Doctor at Large in 1971, and later described those years working alongside George Layton, Geoffrey Davies, Robin Nedwell, and Richard O'Sullivan as the best of his life. The demands of the Doctor productions left him no time for other projects, and he declined to appear in subsequent sequels, a decision he publicly called "incredibly stupid" in a 1977 interview. In 1971 he also appeared in Pete Walker's low-budget thriller Die Screaming, Marianne, playing Eli Frome opposite Susan George.

Evans took the lead in Stanley Long's sex comedy Adventures of a Taxi Driver in 1976, in which his character directly addresses the audience throughout the film, and he starred the same year in the similarly themed Under the Doctor. He chose not to appear in the sequels to Adventures of a Taxi Driver. After a period of financial difficulty during which he claimed benefits and wrote to London Weekend Television to make himself known, he secured what became his most recognized comedy role: Jeremy Brown, the evening class tutor in the ITV sitcom Mind Your Language, which ran from 1977 to 1979 and was written by Vince Powell. The series returned briefly in 1986 for a further thirteen episodes, and was also adapted for American television that year as What a Country! From 1982 to 1983, Evans appeared in the comedy thriller series Legacy of Murder as Robin Bright, the trusted assistant of Dick Emery's character.

By the late 1980s, Evans found that his youthful appearance made it difficult to secure roles appropriate to his age. His final screen credit was the role of Bazzard in the 1993 film adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. By the mid-1990s he had relocated to Hinckley, Leicestershire, where he worked as a minicab driver. He had moved there in 1993 to help his closest friend, Jain Galliford, whom he had first met in Portugal in 1969, raise her four children following the arrest of her partner, Roger Severs, for murdering his parents.

Evans was bisexual. On 10 February 1997, police discovered his body at his home in Leicestershire after attending to inform him that his stolen car had been recovered. The coroner noted a blow to his head and high levels of alcohol in his system. A short will was found on a table beside his body, and a spilled packet of aspirin bearing a pre-decimalisation price tag was found on the floor, though the coroner concluded he had not taken any. An open verdict was returned. An eighteen-year-old was arrested in connection with his death but was released without charge due to insufficient evidence. Evans was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. He was approximately fifty-three years old at the time of his death.

A blue plaque erected by The Heritage Foundation marks 8 Buckland Crescent in Belsize Park, north west London, where Evans lived from 1960 until the early 1980s. A memorial charity lunch in aid of Barnardo's was held in his honor and that of Mind Your Language writer Vince Powell at the Marriott Hotel near Marble Arch. His later career and death were examined in the Channel 4 documentary Saucy! Secrets of the British Sex Comedy, broadcast in July 2024. A biography by Daniel Ward, Barry Evans: The Life and Death of a Sitcom Star, was published in 2025.