Actor who specialised in cockney wideboys

The actor George Cole, who has died aged 90, first found fame in the 1950s playing wheeler-dealer Flash Harry in the St Trinian’s films, but will be best remembered for playing another cockney wideboy decades later.

His portrayal of camel-haircoated, cigar-puffing used car salesman Arthur Daley, always on the lookout for “a nice little earner”, entertained viewers for more than 10 years, with millions tuning in to watch him and Dennis Waterman’s Terry McCann – the long-suffering minder of the title.

Cole’s character, an ambitious but feckless small-time crook, spent each episode dreaming up another get-rich-quick scheme while avoiding the attentions of the police — in the form of Patrick Malahide’s Mr Chisholm — and the never seen but often mentioned ’er indoors.

Cole started his stage career playing a series of a wide-eyed and boyish acolytes of sometimes sinister manipulators, then a doleful young serviceman trying to keep his courage up in war films that included Morning Departure (1950), the story of trapped submariners.

He always protested that he had no ambition and would cheerfully have carried on playing for ever the first part he ever acted. This was only half the story, for from his early years he showed a tenacious fascination with entertainment that lasted a lifetime. Bawdy songs Born in Tooting, southwest London, Cole was the adopted son (as he learned when he was 13) of a council employee, George, and a cleaner, Florence, both amateur musicians. He went to secondary school in Morden, where he entertained his pals with bawdy songs he had heard on the radio.

He began acting when he left school aged 14 and got a job as an understudy in a musical in Blackpool, sharing his dressing room with the animal extras — two goats and six pigeons.

After a spell in the RAF – during which he made one film – he appeared in Scrooge (also known as A Christmas Carol, 1951) and in Laughter in Paradise (also 1951), in which a mischief-maker makes bequests to his stuffy family in his will, on condition that they carry out grotesque acts; Cole was a strait-laced bank clerk encouraged to commit robbery. St Trinian's His first major role saw him share the screen with the Scottish character actor Alastair Sim, who guided his early career and was a lifelong influence.

The pair met in theatre and Cole was taken under Sim’s wing while still a teenager – he plucked the young actor from Blitz-hit London and took him in as an unofficial evacuee in his Oxfordshire home.

Cole never left – he eventually built his own home next door to Sim and his wife – and proceeded to star in a succession of stage shows and films with him, including the series based on St Trinian's, the fictional girls' school created by cartoonist Ronald Searle.

Through the 1950s and 1960s he appeared in dozens of stage and film roles exploiting his little-boy-lost persona, departing from this by appearing in four of the popular St Trinian’s films as the spiv Flash Harry, aiding and abetting the unruly schoolgirls.

It was not until he took to radio and television that his victimised and victimising personalities found their natural media.

His BBC radio series A Life of Bliss, in which he played David Bliss, a diffident young bachelor ruled by his mother and his dog, Psyche, ran for many years from 1953 and also moved to television (1960-1961).

But nothing bettered the wide popular appeal of the unscrupulous conman "Arfur" Daley in Minder, in which he was paired with Dennis Waterman. Here the two poles of his personality fused to create a character with both a rabbity caution and an agile exploitative brain.

Cole used to say that he might well have turned into “Arfur” but for the help given him by Sim, pointing out that while in the RAF from 1943 to 1947 he had helped to run a mess bar and had become familiar with all sorts of dodges.

The success of Minder did not limit Cole's future work when the series – which at its peak attracted an audience of more than 16 million – ended after 15 years. In this respect he was more fortunate than many other actors who have become firmly associated with one television role. Irritability In My Good Friend, launched in 1995, he played Peter Banks, who, he said, was very much like himself – a proud pensioner suffering from an endearing irritability with life. David Yallop, who had written 13 episodes of Minder, decided to expand one episode in which Daley stood for the local council but was disqualified for overspending. From this idea he created the series An Independent Man (1995-96), in which Cole is a slightly dodgy hairdresser who tries to reform his local authority and uncovers all kinds of abuses.

Cole appeared with Julia Roberts in the film Mary Reilly (1996), his first Hollywood assignment since he had played a talking dog in The Blue Bird (1975), which starred Elizabeth Taylor.

He kept on working on TV and in 2008 told Mark Lawson: “I don’t want to stop. I am still enjoying every second of it.”

In 2007 he played Sir Edward Chambers in New Tricks, opposite his old Minder partner Waterman, who he said was "a dream" to work with. Earlier this year, he was cast in a crime-horror film, Road Rage, which has yet to be released.

Cole, who was appointed OBE in 1992, is survived by his second wife, the actor Penny Morrell, whom he married in 1967, and their son, Toby, and daughter, Tara; and by a son, Crispin, and daughter, Harriet, from his first marriage, to the actor Eileen Moore, which ended in divorce.