Coronation Street star Geoffrey Hinsliff dies

Tributes have been paid to former Coronation Street star Geoffrey Hinsliff following his death at the age of 86.

The Leeds-born actor played cabbie Don Brennan in the ITV soap for 10 years from 1987, with audiences gripped by his tempestuous on-screen relationship with Ivy, played by the late Lynne Perrie.

Corrie veteran Helen Worth, who plays Gail Platt, said: "Geoff was a lovely, quiet man who will be sadly missed by us all."

Hinsliff's widow Judith, together with their daughters Gaby and Sophie, described him as "restless, curious, adventurous and funny - he loved nothing better than setting the world to rights around the dinner table".

They added: "But it was family and home that ultimately mattered to him most."

In a statement, ITV added: "His partnership with Lynne Perrie was something rather special and they gave the viewers huge pleasure for many years."

His many storylines included relationships, affairs, attempted murder and kidnapping.

Hinsliff, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in 1960, had previously played other characters in Coronation Street in 1963 and 1977.

His family said: "Geoff was a working-class boy from a family of five, who left school in Leeds aged 15 with no qualifications, yet went on to study at Rada with a scholarship and to join the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"It was an English teacher who encouraged him to act, and all his life he fervently believed in the power of education."

Perrie, who died in 2006, was last seen on the street in 1994 when she announced she was going to live in a convent, and viewers were later told she had died from a stroke.

After leaving the soap in 1997 when his character Don Brennan's car burst into flames after crashing off a viaduct, Hinsliff said: "I am going out in style!

"I really have to go. Don's too far down that road now... there's no going back."

Hinsliff also appeared in crime shows The Professionals and Z-Cars as well as Doctor Who, Brass, A Bridge Too Far and Heartbeat.

His family said "he thoroughly enjoyed playing the forelock-tugging George Fairchild in the cult ITV satire Brass, a pastiche of gritty northern dramas which said so much, and so cleverly, about class divides and the north of his childhood."

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