Glynn Edwards

John Glynn Edwards (2 February 1931 – 23 May 2018) was a British actor born in Penang, Peninsular Malaysia. He worked across stage, television, and film over several decades, earning his widest recognition through the long-running ITV drama series Minder.

Edwards lost his mother at a young age and was raised first by his grandparents in Southsea, Hampshire, and later by his father and stepmother in Salisbury, Wiltshire. His father, who had worked as a rubber planter at the time of Edwards's birth, died in 1946. Edwards received his formal schooling at Clayesmore School in Dorset. As a child he read Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, which sparked a lifelong interest in river-boating that began with sailing on the River Avon in his tenth year. After participating in amateur dramatics as a teenager and attempting sugar farming in Trinidad, he returned to England and trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He subsequently worked as a stage manager at the King's Theatre in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.

His professional acting career took shape through Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where he appeared in productions of The Good Soldier Švejk and two Brendan Behan plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. All three transferred from Stratford East to the West End. Littlewood had noticed Edwards after attending a performance of a production he had staged himself, The Call of the Flesh, which featured Yootha Joyce in an early role. Edwards also appeared in the Theatre Workshop production of Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, Lionel Bart's musical adaptation of Frank Norman's play, alongside Miriam Karlin and Barbara Windsor. The Hostage brought Edwards to Broadway in 1960, marking his sole credited appearance on the New York stage.

In 1964, Edwards took the role of Corporal William Allen, V.C. in Cy Endfield's film Zulu, having turned down a part in Littlewood's Oh! What a Lovely War to do so. He later noted that earnings from advertising Bran Flakes exceeded what he made from Zulu many times over. He went on to appear in supporting roles in Robbery (1967) and Get Carter (1971). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s he made appearances in numerous British television programmes, including Callan, The Professionals, Public Eye, Spindoe, Steptoe and Son, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, Dixon of Dock Green, Man About the House, Softly Softly, The Persuaders!, and The Saint. He was a regular cast member across two series of the ITV legal drama The Main Chance in 1972 and 1975, and took on character roles including a schoolteacher named Mr. Dix in the sitcom Please Sir! and a gamekeeper in ITV's Thriller in 1973.

From 1979 to 1994, Edwards played Dave Harris, part-owner and barman of the Winchester Club, across ten series of Minder on ITV. The role became his most prominent and enduring. In 1985 he appeared in Marillion's music video for the single Heart of Lothian, again playing a barman, and starred in a television commercial for McVitie's rich tea biscuits as a character called Jacko. Edwards retired from acting when Minder concluded in 1994.

His first marriage was to actress Yootha Joyce, who had also trained at the Theatre Workshop; they were married from 1956 to 1969. He subsequently married Christine Pilgrim, a former Benny Hill Show performer, and the couple had a son, Thomas, born in 1971. From the 1980s he was married to Valerie Edwards. During the 1980s and 1990s Edwards lived on a 40-foot canal boat converted into a houseboat, which he named Winchester after the fictional club from Minder, moored on the south bank of the River Thames at Thames Ditton and Surbiton. In his later years he divided his time between Spain and Scotland. Edwards died at his home in Edinburgh on 23 May 2018 at the age of 87.