![[Valid Atom 1.0]](valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom 1.0 feed")
BBC MUNDO RADIO
Christopher Cazenove, who died on April 7 aged 66, began his career playing dashing Edwardian soldier-aristocrats – a reflection of his own upper middle-class background – and later came to international attention as Ben Carrington in the glossy 1980s television soap opera Dynasty.
Among his early roles were those of Lieutenant Richard Gaunt in The Regiment and George Cornwallis-West in Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill. In the 1970s his boyish good looks earned him the part of Charlie Tyrrell in the highly-popular television series The Duchess of Duke Street – his co-stars included Gemma Jones, Iain Cuthbertson and June Brown (later to achieve fame as Dot Cotton in EastEnders).
Cazenove later starred in Kane and Abel (a television adaptation from the novel by Jeffrey Archer) and Jenny's War, before landing the part of Ben Carrington in DynastyThe part took Cazenove to live in Los Angeles, but he subsequently returned to Britain to work on the stage, appearing with Jenny Seagrove in a production of Brief Encounter. Although best known for his television work, Cazenove also worked extensively on the stage and also starred in dramas for Radio 4.
He returned to British television screens in 2001 as Row Colemore in Judge John Deed and Urquart Sav in Fun at the Funeral Parlour.
Having earned a small fortune in Dynasty, Cazenove said that he had blown much of his money on classic cars. After a spell with no work in the early 1990s, he found that he owed his bank £163,000 and in 1995 was the subject of a bankruptcy petition. Although he once described himself as "an awfully uptight sort of person, partly a result of my upbringing", he became a noted bon vivant, telling one newspaper in 2005 that he often drank too much. Asked if his decision to stop smoking was for good, he laughingly replied "One hopes not."
Christopher de Lerisson Cazenove was born in Winchester on December 17 1943. His father, descended from a Huguenot family which had fled religious persecution in France, was a brigadier in the Coldstream Guards, a distinguished soldier and an ADC to King George VI.
Christopher followed his father to Eton, but not to Sandhurst; he failed to win a university place or to join the Navy; and although it occurred to him to join the family stockbroking firm, he decided that the world of business was not for him and set his sights on an acting career.
Having worked as a children's nanny, a chauffeur and a handyman, Cazenove trained as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and joined various repertory companies, making his stage debut in Shaw's Man and Superman at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1967. The following year he took the title role in Hamlet at the Pitlochry Festival. His first London appearance was in 1970, with Rex Harrison in The Lionel Touch at the Lyric Theatre.
A couple of uncredited bit-parts in films – in There's A Girl in My Soup, and as Marc Antony's servant, alongside Charlton Heston, in Julius Caesar (both 1970) – led to his break into television. In 1972 he landed the role of the clean-cut hero Lieutenant Richard Gaunt in The Regiment, a BBC costume drama that followed the fortunes of the Cotswolds Regiment from the Boer War to the north-west frontier of India at the turn of the 19th century. The series propelled Cazenove to pin-up status when he featured on the cover of Radio Times.
In Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, the big ITV series of 1974, marking the centenary of Winston Churchill's birth, Cazenove was cast as George Cornwallis West, a captain in the Scots Guards 20 years younger than the wartime leader's mother, with whom in widowhood she conducted an affair and whom she later married.
He found further fame as the Hon Charles Tyrrell in the 1976 television miniseries The Duchess of Duke Street, a fictionalised rags-to-riches tale of Rosa Lewis, a former maid who eventually took over the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street. Cazenove's character was the love interest for the show's star Gemma Jones playing the bustling Louisa Trotter.
Success on television led to a string of film roles as upper-class military types in Royal Flash (1975), the colonial drama East of Elephant Rock (1977), Zulu Dawn (1979) and Heat and Dust (1982), but top billing eluded him. In the 1980s he appeared as the Baron in the television adaptation of Kane and Abel and as Captain Preston in the Second World War drama Jenny's War, both shown in 1985.
But it was the glossy American soap opera Dynasty that, in 1986, brought Cazenove international fame. As Ben Carrington, he was the evil brother scheming to reclaim the family inheritance from Blake (played by John Forsythe, who died last week).
Cazenove later played Edward Hargreave in the 1990 film Three Men and a Little Lady, the sequel to Three Men and a Baby. On his return to British television in 2001 he played assistant deputy police commissioner Row Colemore in Judge John Deed.
In 2005 he starred as Professor Higgins in a tour of the National Theatre's award-winning production of My Fair Lady.
Christopher Cazenove, who died of septicaemia, married, in 1973, the actress Angharad Rees, with whom he had two sons. Linford, the elder of the two, died in a car crash on the M11 in Essex in 1999 aged 25. The marriage was dissolved in 1994, and he is survived by his partner, Isabel Davis, and by his younger son, Rhys.
