John Challis

Challis was involved in the early years of lunchtime pub theatre at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, and played a leading role in Sam Walters’ production of Václav Havel’s play The Memorandum in 1977.

Later stage highlights included National Theatre productions of On the Razzle and The Rivals, with Michael Hordern, UK tours of Entertaining Mr Sloane, with Barbara Windsor, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor, with Frank Finlay. He appeared with Sue Holderness – Marlene in Only Fools and Horses – in Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, Time and Time Again and How the Other Half Loves, as well as in their own show, Boycie and Marlene. He also toured his own solo show, Only Fools and Boycie.

In the 1990s, at the height of the success of Only Fools and Horses, he returned to the stage to appear in Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. He was also a panto stalwart, usually playing the more villainous characters.

In 2000, Challis achieved a lifelong ambition to play Malvolio in Twelfth Night, at Stafford Castle. In 2011 he performed As You Like It at Ludlow Castle, not far from his home on the Shropshire-Herefordshire border, where he moved with his fourth wife, Carol, in 1998.

It was a visit to stay with Challis in his rural retreat that inspired Sullivan to write Green Green Grass, in which Boycie and Marlene are forced, through circumstances beyond their control, to abandon Peckham for an unfamiliar life in the country with their son Tyler and their pet Rottweiler, Earl.

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In 2015, Challis joined the cast of the hit TV series Benidorm, playing Monty Staines, the love interest of Joyce Temple-Savage, manager of the Solana Resort. Monty is briefly employed as the resort’s entertainments manager.

Last year, Challis fronted the documentary Boycie in Belgrade, which looked at the continuing popularity of Only Fools and Horses in Serbia. It is the most watched programme in the Balkan nation, and, in recognition of that, Challis was made an honorary citizen.

He wrote two volumes of memoirs, Being Boycie (2011) and Boycie and Beyond (2012), detailing his own rollercoaster personal life as well the ups and downs of being an actor, including the time in the mid-1970s when he ran a garden centre, thinking his career was over. It was 1976 – the year of one of the worst droughts on record – and all his plants died. Luckily he landed a role in Doctor Who that reinvigorated his acting career.

His appearance in Citizen Smith in 1980 first brought him to the attention of Sullivan, who kept him in mind for his next hit comedy, Only Fools and Horses.

In an online interview in 2019, Challis reflected: “Everybody told me that acting was a very precarious profession and that I’d spend most of my time out of work. To be honest, being out of work and having not very much to do was one of the things that attracted me to it.”

John Challis was born on August 16, 1942, and died on September 19, 2021, aged 79. He is survived by his wife, Carol.