Who was the first Avenger?
While to much of the world The Avengers means Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow, those of us with longer memories remember a different team of crime-fighters with that name. But it wasn’t Stan Lee’s band of superheroes that arrived first — two years before that first issue of The Avengers hit American bookshelves came the first episode of a British series that would, in many ways, become one of the defining TV shows of the 1960s, and make stars of the actors Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg and Honor Blackman.
And those are the names we all think of when we picture that series: it’s John Steed (Macnee) in his bowler hat, Savile Row suit and Shaftesbury Slim umbrella and it’s Emma Peel (Rigg) and Cathy Gale (Blackman) kicking ass in their black leather fighting suits.
But what’s generally forgotten is that Patrick Macnee wasn’t always the first-billed star of The Avengers at its very beginning. Look at any episode from that first season in 1961, and it’s the actor Ian Hendry who’s credited first, headlining as David Keel, a medical doctor who, in the opening episode, finds himself investigating the murder of his fiancée, by what turns out to be members of a drug gang.
It was all a far cry from the robot assassins and telepathic man-eating plants that would characterise later Avengers episodes. And just as the show’s grittier beginnings have been largely disremembered, so has the series’ first leading man.
It’s hard to overestimate how much of a star Ian Hendry was in the early 1960s. A year before The Avengers debuted, he’d been the lead of another ITV drama, Police Surgeon, but despite that show being axed after just 13 episodes, Hendry had proved so popular with audiences that ABC TV (who produced the series for ITV) essentially devised The Avengers as a vehicle for him.
Yet, over the course of that first season’s 26 episodes it would be Dr Keel’s flamboyant, enigmatic cohort, John Steed, who would become the series’ standout character. So when season two’s production was delayed, by which time Hendry was contracted to a film role, ABC barely hesitated to move ahead without their original leading man, thus moving Macnee up a rung, and giving him a new co-star in Honor Blackman.
Dr David Keel was never mentioned again in The Avengers, and as Macnee’s star grew over the course of the next eight years (The Avengers broadcast its final episode in 1969), Hendry would see his fame dwindle despite roles in films such as Sidney Lumet’s The Hill alongside Sean Connery, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion with Catherine Deneuve.
There were occasional lead parts in such shows as ITV’s The Informer (1966-67) and the BBC’s The Lotus Eaters (1972-73), but most of his small screen work were one-off guest appearances, while the film career he hoped would take off post-Avengers never did ignite.
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There were near-misses however. Director Mike Hodges had wanted him for the lead in 1971’s Get Carter, only the movie’s producer — and studio — had other ideas, and Michael Caine was cast as the titular Jack Carter. As a consolation, Hendry was offered the role of Carter’s old acquaintance Eric Paise, but, according to Hodges, the actor came to resent Caine during filming. “The fact that Caine’s career was in the ascendance,” the director said in an interview in 2016, “while his was in reverse undoubtedly bugged Ian.”
Certainly, Hendry’s drinking wasn’t helping. The actor was just 40 when he filmed Get Carter, but looked a decade older, likely exacerbated by a chaotic and booze-fuelled private life (his wife, Janet Munro, was also battling an alcohol problem, and died in 1972, aged just 38).
“His battered face reflected his boozy lifestyle, his voice a gravelly mix of brandy and smoke,” his biographer Gabriel Hershman states in the book Send in the Clowns: The Yo Yo Life of Ian Hendry. “The charisma and authority were as strong as ever but the handsome young man who made women swoon was gone.” As time went on, Gabriel writes, “Ian seemed to be losing the battle with his demons and good parts were dwindling.”
In the late 1970s things got so bad, Hendry was declared bankrupt. He was still managing to work, but what he was being offered — daytime serials, soap operas and parts in poorly-paid provincial theatre productions — was all a far cry from the kind of prestige primetime dramas he’d been headlining 20 years before.
His final role saw him cast as the former seadog Davey Jones in Channel Four’s Brookside in 1984. Though he brought his A-game to the part, the by-now fifty-something actor clearly wasn’t in the best of health.
“Hendry had been one of the most handsome actors of his generation,” Brookside actor Ricky Tomlinson wrote in his autobiography. “He married an actress, Janet Munro, and they were always being photographed by society magazines and showbiz papers.
“This is the man I expected to meet, but the man who arrived on set that day looked awful. Someone said he’d recovered from throat cancer and I know he suffered from problems with alcohol. He was staying at the Adelphi Hotel and someone picked him up every morning and brought him to set to make sure he arrived on time. He must have ached inside when he saw how far he had fallen. From being a huge star he had become a bit-part actor in a soap opera.”
Hendry’s last public appearance was as a guest on Patrick Macnee’s October 1984 episode of This Is Your Life. Clearly inebriated, he looked far older than his 52 years, and it couldn’t have escaped his notice how stratospheric his one-time co-star’s career had gone in the 20-odd years since they’d starred together in The Avengers.
When Ian Hendry died of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage on Christmas Eve 1984, his death barely registered in the media (American actor Peter Lawford, who died the same day, generated more coverage). And even to Avengers fans, he remains something of an unknown. Of the 26 episodes made for that first season, only two exist in their entirety. Of Police Surgeon, just one episode remains. And of the 21 episodes of The Informant, only two survive.
At his height, Hendry was one of the most fascinating actors of the 1960s, but sadly most of his best work has been lost to time. What remains gives us just a glimmer of what he was capable of. There’s no doubt that, had Mike Hodges prevailed, and alcohol permitting, Ian Hendry would have made a darkly charismatic and compelling Jack Carter.
Maybe it would have been the role that reanimated his career, but we’ll never know. But as disappointing as it was to him, his place in television history is assured, as the man who helped shape one of the signature shows of the 60s, and for starring as the very first Avenger.
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