Bernard Archard was a reliable character actor of authoritative demeanour who spent the best part of his career in supporting parts, becoming a recognisable face, if not a name, while occasionally getting the chance to do more.

For Archard this opportunity came in 1959 when he was cast as Lt-Col Oreste Pinto in the BBC series Spycatcher, which was based on true events. Pinto was a Dutch intelligence officer, reckoned to be one of the best at winkling out spies, who was based in Britain during the Second World War.

Spycatcher was usually confined to a single room with a table and two chairs, and was essentially a two-hander featuring Archard’s Pinto, and the man he was trying to unmask as a German spy.

Tall, lean, with an angular face, he exuded quiet authority as Pinto. The show ran for three years and was watched by millions. But if he rarely again had a leading role, he remained busily employed both in television and in the cinema into his seventies.

Bernard Joseph Archard was born in Fulham, London, the son of a jeweller who was also mayor of the borough, in 1916. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and had an early stage part as Orsino in Twelfth Night at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park.

A conscientious objector during the Second World War, he worked in repertory at Chesterfield and Sheffield and ran a touring company from Torquay with his partner, James Belchamber. Archard was in his forties when he made his television debut in Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth in 1957. The first of his many films, Corridors of Blood with Boris Karloff, came a year later. But he was still little known when he was then recruited for Spycatcher.

Archard’s next substantial role, as General Plaski, came in The Midnight Men (1964), a BBC thriller set in the Balkans in 1913. In 1966 he was Bragen, the security chief, in a Doctor Who story, The Power of the Daleks, and returned to the show in the 1970s to play a professor in the control of the villain in the story Pyramids of Mars.

In the 1980s he made an impressive Duke of Wellington in Number 10 and he played the editor in Lytton’s Diary which featured Peter Bowles as a Fleet Street gossip columnist. One of his final appearances, in 1992, was in the soap opera Emmerdale, as the second husband of Annie Sugden who perished in an horrific plane crash.

He appeared in the legal drama Crown Court, was HM Inspector of Constabulary in Z Cars and turned up in Rumpole of the Bailey, Bergerac, Dad’s Army and Keeping Up Appearances.

His films included Village of the Damned, The List of Adrian Messenger, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, The Day of the Jackal and Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990). Later stage work included Terence Rattigan’s final play, Cause Célèbre, in the West End in 1977, and the Old Vic production of Macbeth with Peter O’Toole (1980) in which he played Duncan.

He retired to Somerset with James Belchamber, with whom he registered a civil partnership in 2006.

Bernard Archard, actor, was born on August 20, 1916. He died on May 1, 2008, aged 91