Patrick McGoohan came to the peak of his fame in the cult television series The Prisoner which he devised, wrote and starred in. It is still repeated on TV networks across the world after more than 40 years.

It was in 1966 when the stubborn, fiery-tempered actor first mooted his concept of an agent-scientist, known simply as Number Six, who decides to resign and is held captive week after week in a model village by polite gentlemen in boaters and blazers trying to prise from him vital space secrets. At the time McGoohan was the highest paid TV actor in Britain. He had been earning £2,000 a week for his other highly successful spy series Danger Man, which at its peak played in 61 countries, making much money for Lew Grade and his company Associated Television.

Danger Man, in which McGoohan played the hero John Drake, was renowned for its clean-cut image; no sex and no undue violence, at the star’s insistence. In spite of the show’s purity compared with rivals like The Saint, it remained high in the American charts for years. But finally the TV moguls there became nervous and wanted Drake to loosen up and seduce a woman or two. So McGoohan resigned and took The Prisoner to Grade, who swallowed hard at the enormous budget for its day of £75,000 an episode. But Grade decided to indulge his forceful moneymaker and allowed him to go ahead.

McGoohan wrote most of the scripts and took his cameras and crew to the village of Portmeirion in North Wales. He began shooting his puzzling blend of cliff-hanging thriller and political allegory — 17 episodes in all.

When they were screened, audiences, familiar with a diet of simple, easily understood plots and characters in format thrillers like The Avengers, were left baffled. McGoohan’s brainchild, on which he staked his reputation, was no immediate hit but it was not a flop either, building to a then respectable audience of 4,300,000 and peaking at six million.

Not everyone was intrigued by the Kafkaesque riddles, the electroaversion therapy, the brainwashing benignly inflicted to create a harmonious, unchallenging society that McGoohan’s Number Six was ever trying to flee.

The freedom and power that McGoohan was allowed by Grade in producing The Prisoner was unprecedented in British TV. Possibly there was some unease within ATV’s hierarchy because the series was unexpectedly terminated. McGoohan dashed off the final episode two days before filming was to start, and immediately after it was screened angry viewers choked the company’s switchboard demanding to know why the myriad puzzles raised in the series were not explained. McGoohan was besieged at his home in Mill Hill, northwest London, and even physically attacked in the street.

Before The Prisoner, Portmeirion was famous as the inspired architectural folly of Clough Williams-Ellis. It is now almost as known as “the Prisoner’s village”, with a shop stuffed with Prisoner badges, stills and handbooks to individual episodes.

McGoohan was born in New York of Irish parents who, when he was 6 months old, returned to Ireland where he was brought up on a family farm in Co Leitrim. He was 10 when the family moved to Sheffield from where he attended Ratcliffe College in Leicester, proving to have a talent for mathematics and rugby. His mother was devoutly religious and said that if her first-born was a boy he would become a priest.

McGoohan dropped that idea at 16 and left school at the height of the Second World War, taking a variety of jobs including wire-making in a steel works, a clerk in a bank and chicken farming. He appeared in amateur theatricals in his spare time. His four younger sisters found their shy brother a girlfriend, and the couple dutifully walked out for 18 months but it came to nothing. He was engaged as an assistant stage manager with the city’s repertory company at the Sheffield Playhouse where, helped by his athletic 6ft 2in build, blue eyes and chilling good looks, he rapidly became a regular leading man doing 24 plays a year. There he met the actress Joan Drummond and after an 18-month conventional courtship — he made no secret of his disapproval of sex before marriage — they were married in 1955 in between rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew and a matinee of Sheridan’s The Rivals. They were to have three daughters.

McGoohan moved to London where after a few minor stage roles in the West End he was signed by Rank at a time when the British film industry was flourishing. His clipped, almost metallic delivery in the manner of Olivier’s Richard III, and the persistent stare, made him an ideal movie actor. Among his early films were No Life for Ruth, Dr Syn, Three Lives of Thomasina and All Night Long, in which he played a jazz drummer and locked himself in a garage with a drum kit to practise for hours. Possibly his most memorable role of the period was a villain at the wheel in a taut thriller called Hell Drivers that co-starred the also emerging Stanley Baker and Herbert Lom.

Danger Man followed in 1959 after a troubled Rank failed to renew his contract along with other players.