Colin Tapley

Tapley was born on 7 May 1909 at Dunedin, New Zealand, the son of Harold Livingstone Tapley, later mayor of Dunedin and MP for Dunedin North, and Jean Brodie Tapley (née Burt). He was educated at Christ's College, Christchurch from 1918 to 1926, and took part in the first of Richard Byrd's expeditions to Antarctica before moving to the United Kingdom and joining the Royal Air Force. In January 1942 Tapley returned to Britain on the Brimanger to help the war after enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He found employment as a flight instructor due to his past experience in the Royal Air Force and was later transferred to Britain as a flight controller. During his service he was forced to parachute from a crashing aircraft and so was awarded membership of the Caterpillar Club.

After demobilisation in 1945, Tapley married Patricia (Patsy) Hambro Lyon, whom he had met during the war, and returned to his native New Zealand for the first time since 1933. He soon tired of life in New Zealand and returned to Hollywood to re-establish his film career. Legendary American film director and Academy Award-winning film producer Cecil B. DeMille personally gave him a role in his new film, Samson and Delilah, which Tapley accepted, playing the part of a prince. Shortly after finishing Samson and Delilah, Tapley and Patsy, finding that Hollywood had changed for the worse, returned to Britain. Due to Tapley's upper class accent he had no difficulty finding work in the film industry; it was also the boom period of British war films in the '50s and '60s and he landed the role of a lifetime, the revered war epic The Dam Busters film of 1955 where alongside Michael Redgrave he played William Glanville who helped to develop the famous bouncing bomb. From 1954 to 1958, he appeared as a police inspector named Parker, working with his good friend Donald Gray, in the detective television series The Vise (later known as Saber of London). He was subsequently typecast and would play a police officer in many of his later films. His acting career ended in 1983, at the age of 74, and he retired to Coates, Gloucestershire with his wife, Patsy.