The actor Patrick Murray, who has died aged 68, found fame as Mickey Pearce, the trilby-wearing chancer who briefly goes into partnership with his old schoolfriend Rodney Trotter, in Only Fools and Horses, the TV sitcom created by John Sullivan.
He was introduced early in the third series, in a 1983 episode titled Healthy Competition, in which Rodney’s ambition to move on from being just a lookout for his older brother Derek (Del Boy) was instantly thwarted when Mickey ripped him off. The Trotter brothers (David Jason as Del and Nicholas Lyndhurst as Rodney) were reunited, and Mickey remained a regular presence all the way through to the programme’s final Christmas special in 2003.
The character had been mentioned several times after Only Fools and Horses began in 1981, including in the story of Mickey stealing Rodney’s girlfriend, but did not initially appear on screen. When Sullivan wanted to expand the supporting cast, the producer, Ray Butt, recalled Murray’s performance in a TV commercial for Pizza Hut, unsuccessfully chatting up two women, and suggested him for Mickey. The actor was auditioned on a Friday and began work on the series three days later.
Mickey was conceived as “Del Boy lite”, less savvy but, like Del, usually seeing his money-making antics go wrong. “Mickey will try anything, but he’s not very trustworthy,” Murray told Steve Clark, author of The Only Fools and Horses Story. “He’s always stitching Rodney up, and Del is always threatening to clump him for it.” The spiv persistently ridicules Rodney about his lack of girlfriends while lying about this own romantic “conquests” and flitting between jobs.
One 1989 storyline had to be rapidly revamped after an accident in which Murray fell over his dog at home and crashed through a glass window, severing a tendon in his right arm and losing five pints of blood. With the actor’s arm in a plaster cast, Sullivan rewrote the next episode to incorporate Mickey being roughed up by local gangsters.
The sitcom’s final episode was screened in 1991, but Murray was among those cast members who returned for Christmas specials for another 12 years – and remained popular at fan conventions.
Murray was born in Greenwich, south London, to Juana (nee Romero Tejero), a dancer, and Patrick, a London Transport inspector, and attended St Thomas the Apostle college, Nunhead. Aged 15, he spotted an advert for a theatrical agency in the Daily Mirror and within a week had been cast in a stage play. He was soon getting television roles, starting in 1973, aged 16, in Places Where They Sing, a BBC play based on Simon Raven’s novel about student unrest on a college campus. It was quickly followed by a starring part in the children’s adventure serial The Terracotta Horse, filmed in Spain and Morocco.
He also had roles in Barrie Keeffe’s short TV play Hanging Around (1978), about disaffected youths, and the film The Class of Miss MacMichael (1978), starring Glenda Jackson as an idealistic teacher trying to inspire juvenile delinquents, before his big break came.
In Scum, Roy Minton’s play about the brutal borstal system, he was Dougan, a good-natured inmate whose head for figures means he is trusted to deal with money discreetly brought in by visitors, which he collects on his tea trolley round. He even manages to negotiate down the “daddy’s” percentage when Carlin (Ray Winstone) assumes that role.
The drama, made for Play for Today in 1977, was banned by the BBC for the extent of its violence, although it was eventually broadcast in 1991. In the meantime, the director, Alan Clarke, remade it as a feature film in 1979, with Murray as one of six from the original cast reprising their roles.
He then had small parts in the films Quadrophenia (1979) and Breaking Glass (1980), and appeared as a bellboy in Curse of the Pink Panther (1983).
Fame in Only Fools and Horses brought him a string of guest appearances in the 1980s and 90s in TV shows such as Dempsey and Makepeace, Lovejoy, The Return of Shelley and The Upper Hand. He also took two roles in The Bill.
But his life spiralled downhill after he became a Kent pub manager in 1998, drinking too much and eventually finding help from Alcoholics Anonymous. He later moved to Thailand, where he married his second wife, Anong, in 2016. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Britain and worked as a cab driver. Murray made a brief return to acting in 2019 as a cockney gangster, Frank Bridges, in the TV series Conditions, still to be screened.
He was diagnosed with the lung disease COPD in 2018 and, three years later, lung cancer and a tumour on his liver. Although he was given the all-clear in 2022 following surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer returned shortly afterwards.
In 1981, Murray married Shelley Wilkinson; the marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by Anong, their daughter, Josie, and the three sons of his first marriage, Lee, Ricky and Robert, as well as three sisters and two brothers.