Howard Lew Lewis
Birthday: Born in 1941-08-21 in London, England
Deathday: 2018-01-20
Howard Lew Lewis was an English comedian and actor best known for his roles in the 1980s sitcom Brush Strokes and Tony Robinson's children's comedy series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. His first job was with the RAF as a a computer operator and he worked for several years in computing and telecommunications at managerial level before undertaking acting as his chosen career. He often appeared in vehicles for Ronnie Barker, including The Magnificent Evans and Open All Hour, and appeared in the first series of Blackadder. His film roles included Hal in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a guard in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Richard Attenborough's Chaplin, and the voice of Obelix in the 1994 animated film Asterix in America. Diabetes and dementia plagued him in later years and he was admitted into a community hospital in Edinburgh in 2017. He passed away there on 20th January 2018. Police Scotland confirmed later that month that they were investigating a complaint brought by Lewis's daughter Debora Milazzo against the hospital. She claimed that her father was given an unnecessary cocktail of high-dose sedatives and maximum-strength opiate painkillers that subsequently brought about his death. The police ultimately found no case to answer.
TV Credits
The Bill
Character:
The daily lives of the men and women at Sun Hill Police Station as they fight crime on the streets of London. From bomb threats to armed robbery and drug raids to the routine demands of policing this ground-breaking series focuses as much on crime as it does on the personal lives of its characters....
Keen Eddie
Character:
Keen Eddie is an American action, comedy-drama television series that aired in 2003 on the Fox Network. The series follows a brash NYPD detective who goes to London when one of his cases goes sour and remains to work with New Scotland Yard. The basic premise of the show bears a close resemblance to the popular 1980s British series Dempsey & Makepeace, the only notable difference being that the female partner has been replaced by a female housemate. Stylistically, the series derived inspiration f...
Noel's House Party
Character:
Noel's House Party is a BBC television light entertainment show hosted by Noel Edmonds that was broadcast live on Saturday evenings throughout the 1990s. It was set in a large house in the fictional village of Crinkley Bottom, leading to much innuendo. The show was broadcast during the autumn-spring season. It was the successor show to Noel's Saturday Roadshow, and carried over some of its regular features such as the Gunge Tank, the Gotcha Oscar and Wait 'Till I Get You Home. In 2010, Noel's Ho...
Brush Strokes
Character: Elmo Putney
Jacko (Karl Howman) is a painter and decorator with an eye for the ladies. He works with Eric (Mike Walling), who's married to his sister Jean (Nicky Croydon). The painting and decorating firm they work for is owned by Lionel Bainbridge (Gary Waldhorn). Other characters include Lionel's wife, Veronica (Elizabeth Counsell), his daughter Lelsey (Kim Thomson, later Erika Hoffman) and wine bar owner Elmo Putney (Howard Lew Lewis)....
The Magnificent Evans
Character: Bridegroom
The Magnificent Evans is a 1984 BBC situation comedy written by Roy Clarke and starring Ronnie Barker, Sharon Morgan and Myfanwy Talog....
Chelmsford 123
Character: Blag
Chelmsford 123 is a British television situation comedy produced for Channel 4 by Hat Trick Productions. It ran for two series, of six and seven episodes, in 1988 and 1990. The series was set in the British town of Chelmsford in the year AD 123, and concerned the power struggle between Roman governor Aulus Paulinus and the British chieftain, Badvoc. Britain is a miserable place, cold and wet – just the place to exile Aulus for accidentally insulting the Emperor's horse, but also give him someth...
Minder
Character: Ronnie Aldridge
This comedy drama series featured Terry McCann, a former boxer with a conviction for G.B.H., and Arthur Daley, a second-hand car dealer with an eye for a nice little earner. Alongside his many business ventures, Arthur would regularly hire Terry out as a minder or bodyguard, later replaced by nephew, Ray Daley....
The Kenny Everett Television Show
Character: Guest
Sketch comedy show starring Kenny Everett....
Blackadder
Character: Mr. Applebottom
Black Adder traces the deeply cynical and self-serving lineage of various Edmund Blackadders throughout British history, from the muck of the Middle Ages to the frontline of the First World War....
Pennies from Heaven
Character: Policeman
Pennies From Heaven is a 1978 BBC television drama serial written by Dennis Potter. The title is taken from a song of the same name written by Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston. It was one of several Potter serials to mix the reality of the drama with a dark fantasy content, and the earliest of his works where the characters burst into miming to popular 1930s songs....
Maid Marian and Her Merry Men
Character: Rabies
Maid Marian and her Merry Men is a British children's sitcom created and written by Tony Robinson and directed by David Bell. It began in 1989 on BBC One and ran for four series, with the last episode shown in 1994. The show was a partially musical comic retelling of the legend of Robin Hood, placing Maid Marian in the role of leader of the Merry Men, and reducing Robin to an incompetent ex-tailor. The programme was much appreciated by children and adults alike, and has been likened to Blackadd...
Reilly: Ace of Spies
Character: Rowhedge
Reilly, Ace of Spies is a 1983 television miniseries dramatizing the life of Sidney Reilly, a Russian Jew who became one of the greatest spies ever to work for the British. Among his exploits, in the early 20th century, were the infiltration of the German General Staff in 1917 and a near-overthrow of the Bolsheviks in 1918. His reputation with women was as legendary as his genius for espionage....
Screen Two
Character: Wandsworth Prison Officer
Series of single made-for-television dramas....
Movie Credits
Fords on Water
Character: Man in Toilets
Influential, cult classic, UK buddy road movie about two friends, one white and one black, who bond over their desire to escape from boredom and unemployment in Thatcher's Britain....
Gobble
Character: Fat Bloke
As Christmas celebrations get under way, Britain is rocked by a deadly new food scare - "mad turkey disease"....
Knockback: 1
Character: Wandsworth Prison Officer
In 1965, at the age of 25, Alan Ackland is sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a business associate. In 1971, Sylvia Barker, lonely and depressed after a failed marriage and with two young children to bring up alone, seeks a new direction in her life and applies to become a voluntary prison visitor. Several years later their paths cross....
Small Town Folk
Character: Knackerman #1
High above the tiny hamlet of Grockleton stands Beesley Manor, home to the ominous Landlord and his...shall we say, genetically ambiguent...minions, including Pooch, a cross-eyed marksman, and Dobbin, who likes to drink gasoline. The Landlord keeps a watchful eye over his domain, brutally dispatching any strangers who enter - except for females he needs to (involuntarily) sire a Beesley heir...When three unsuspecting travelers arrive, the Landlord plans to make two of them his trophies and the o...
Chaplin
Character: Workhouse Official
An aged Charlie Chaplin narrates his life to his autobiography's editor, including his rise to wealth and comedic fame from poverty, his turbulent personal life and his run-ins with the FBI....
Chaos and Cadavers
Character: Cabbie
Two young newlyweds, geeky Edward and innocent but alluring Samantha, turn up at a majestic and remote country house hotel for their honeymoon, which has been taken over by the high-spirited members of an Undertakers' Annual Convention. Their attempts at romance are quickly dampened as they become helplessly embroiled in an intriguing whodunit when the Head of the Funeral Directors' Association dies under bizarre circumstances....
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Character: Hal
Nobleman crusader Robin of Locksley breaks out of a Jerusalem prison with the help of Moorish fellow prisoner Azeem and travels back home to England. But upon arrival he discovers his dead father in the ruins of his family estate, killed by the vicious sheriff of Nottingham, Robin and Azeem join forces with outlaws Little John and Will Scarlett to save the kingdom from the sheriff's villainy....
The Tichborne Claimant
Character: The Hotel Manager
Based on a true story, set in the late 19th century: Lord Tichborne, the ninth richest nobleman in England, disappears after a South American shipwreck. Some years later his erudite Afro-English valet, Bogle, is sent to investigate rumors that Tichborne survived and settled in Australia. An alcoholic ruffian answer's Bogle's inquiries claiming to be the lost heir. Bogle suspects fraud, but conspires with the claimant to split the inheritance should the latter succesfully pass himself off to frie...
Quills
Character: First Vendor
A nobleman with a literary flair, the Marquis de Sade lives in a madhouse where a beautiful laundry maid smuggles his erotic stories to a printer, defying orders from the asylum's resident priest. The titillating passages whip all of France into a sexual frenzy, until a fiercely conservative doctor tries to put an end to the fun....
Brazil
Character: Black Maria Guard
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies....
The Baby Juice Express
Character: Kent
A middle class London lad’s gangster fantasies go awry when his dodgy uncle puts them into debt to a real life crime boss. Still pulling strings from behind bars, the kingpin’s only desire is to conceive an heir by smuggling his sperm to his wife on the outside. There’s only one way the boys know how to raise the money fast … hijack the ‘baby juice express’. But kidnapping ‘baby juice’ turns out to be fraught with even more peril than the bumbling wannabes could possibly have imagined in this c...
Shadowlands
Character: Tea Room Waiter
C.S. Lewis, a world-renowned writer and professor, leads a passionless life until he meets spirited poet Joy Gresham....