Eugene Deckers

When you watch as many old films and TV series as I do, you begin to recognise certain faces.  Not the stars, obviously, hey have their names emblazoned at the top of the credits, but rather the supporting players.  Often they are uncredited, making identifying them difficult.  Nonetheless, there are some who just turn up over and over again in low budget films, sometimes performing what amounts to little more than a bit part, other times in significant supporting roles.  They never became stars, instead spending their careers toiling away as character actors.  Eventually, you end up admiring their versatility for the sheer variety of characters they tackle.  Yet they remain largely unheralded.  One such is Eugene Deckers.  I doubt that nowadays more than a handful of people know his name, yet, throughout the fifties and sixties, he was a prolific performer, both in film and television.  I only became aware of him relatively recently, as a result of watching episodes of the 1954 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes TV series back-to-back.  Made primarily for US TV syndication, this Ronald Howard starring series was shot largely in France, which resulted in the use of a number of French actors pretending to be British in the guest roles.  Often their English accents would slip and their attempts at regional British accents were often unintentionally amusing.  After a while, I realised that there was one actor I assumed to be French, who just kept turning up, in a bewilderingly diverse selection of roles.  According to the brief and incomplete cast listings on the closing credits, I found out that he was Eugene Deckers and had appeared in seven episodes, platying a different character each time.

These roles were usually villainous - in one episode he is a murderer who feigns blindness, in another he is an escaped convict who attempts to kill Holmes, in a particularly flamboyant turn, he plays a Russian composer suspected of murder.  But perhaps his most memorable role is that of Harry Crocker, not a villain, but a rather a music hall escapologist wrongly accused of murder.  He gives a colourful turn as Crocker, even attempting a cockney accent and dominating the episode.  It's so different from most of his other appearances in the series that, at first, it was hard to believe that it was the same actor.  Although he maintains that cockney accent quite well, speaking so fast that it is difficult, most of the time, to discern his underlying accent.  Which wasn't, as I'd thought, French, but rather Belgian.  As it turned out, he was a Belgian actor who had come to the UK during the war and had forged a successful stage career, before branching out into films and TV post-war.  The Sherlock Holmes series clearly supplied him with a lot of work in this period.  Of course, it wasn't unusual in early TV series to see the same supporting actors turning up in different roles from episode to episode.  Production schedules were so tight, (according to star Ronald Howard, episodes of Sherlock Holmes were filmed in four days), that it made sense to have what was effectively a 'repertory company' of actors for the series.  (It was also a practice followed by many smaller film studios, especially those turning out series.  Even Hammer followed the practice - many of its films of the fifties and sixties employ the same supporting casts from movie to movie).  Deckers wasn't the only actor to put in multiple appearances in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: even Archie Duncan who regularly portrayed Inspector Lestrade would occasionally turn up playing someone different).

The interesting thing is that once you identify an actor like Deckers, you start seeing them everywhere.  No sooner had I discovered his name and biography, he turned up in an early episode of The Saint which I was watching, playing a French police inspector.   Deckers died in 1977, with his last film credit in 1969 and his last TV appearance in 1970, in an episode of the Charlie Drake comedy The Worker.  He had worked steadily throughout the sixties - he often pops up in films playing waiters, hotel receptionists and diplomats, nearly always 'foreigners'.  His biggest film role probably came in 1959, in the Kenneth More starring North West Frontier, playing the arms dealer, Peters.  A clearly talented actor, Eugene Deckers was never a star.  This is probably the most anyone has written about him in decades.  For our purposes, he represents all of those unsung heroes of jobbing supporting actors, always unheralded, but nevertheless essential to the success of many films and TV series.  We seldom know their names, but always recognise their faces.  Well, now you know the name of at least one of them.