Tony Britton has died aged 95, his TV presenter daughter Fern announced today.
The former This Morning presenter took to Twitter to announce the sad news.
She wrote: "Our father, Tony Britton, died early this morning. Great actor, director and charmer. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
Legendary actor Tony starred in films Operation Amsterdam, Sunday Bloody Sunday and The Day of the Jackal.
he was also known for playing the famously conservative Doctor dad in BBC sitcom Don't Wait Up with charmer son Nigel Havers and Dinah Sheridan.
Other hit sitcoms appearances included ...And Mother Makes Five and Robin's Nest.
Fern's mother Ruth brought up Fern and her older sister Cherry alone after splitting from Tony when Fern was still a baby.
Britton remarried Danish sculptor and member of the wartime resistance Eva Castle Britton and has one son, actor Jasper Britton.
After army service in World War Two, Tony was spotted, aged 20, by a local critic in an amateur dramatic production in his then-home town of Weston-super-Mare.
Speaking to the Lanchashire Post in 2008 he recalled: "He introduced me to one or two people and one of them gave me a job and I walked on in Worthing in two plays one after the other.
"I did have one line in the second one, it was As You Like It. I had the part of a woodsman or a huntsman or something like that.
And somebody, like the King or somebody, said: 'Which is he that killed the deer?' And I had to say: 'Sir, t'was I.' And that was it.
"And I got a job after that – and it rolled!"
Tony recommended Nigel Havers for his role as his son in Don't Wait Up.
"He and I had done one television piece before. So when I was sent these scripts to see whether I wanted to do Don't Wait Up, I said, 'Yes, I do – and there's a guy called Nigel who ought to play my son.' And wasn't I right?
"We had such fun doing both those series. The writing was extraordinary, particularly of Robin's Nest. The two men who wrote it were geniuses.
"I used to go for the read-throughs and I couldn't speak sometimes. I just fell about, some of the stuff they wrote was extraordinary."
Speaking about daughter Fern Tony famnously said she shunned TV initially.
He said: "Fern one day presented me with a form and said, 'Dada, sign that,' and it was the form for the Central School of Drama in London.
"And I saw she had put in, not for acting, but for stage management. And I said, 'What? Why? What? Why don't you want to do the acting?'
"There you are – you're beautiful, you're brilliant, you've got a beautiful personality, you're intelligent, you're all those lovely things! What do you mean, stage management?
"And she said, 'No dada, no acting, not for me!' So she did the stage management course – and killed it absolutely; number one in the class."TV.
"Everywhere I go, people stop me in the street and they say, 'Oooh, your daughter, she's so lovely.'
"And there she is now up there, she's a number one lady in the business and it's just fantastic to see. I switch her on the odd morning or two now and then, to see how she's getting on.
"And we exchange a text message or two – usually rude! It's wonderful."
