‘The scene that got my attention was Hendry’s flashback to a tyre-squealing encounter with a Lancia 2000’
Ian Hendry followed in a great tradition of troubled, alcoholic British actors of the post-war years, but he didnʼt reach the heights of fame and notoriety his abundant talent deserved. By all accounts friendly and professional, he was also prolific. Hendry was a gift to the new medium and rarely off the tiny, smudgy TV screens of the 1960s and ʼ70s in series such as The Lotus Eaters, the early incarnation of The Avengers and pretty much every ITC action show you can think of.
As the seedy, Cadillac-driving Eric Pace, Hendry was one of the best things in Get Carter, but his first uncredited speaking role was in a great 1956 heist film called The Secret Place, in which he drives a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 dhc.
Hendry drove a lot of Jaguars on screen – XJ6s in Tales from the Crypt and The Internecine Project – but the only cars I know for certain he owned were a Morris Minor and the S-type Bentley he famously reversed into the Thames. That was probably after one of the lively parties he hosted at his house in Shepperton, where he lived on one of the islands on the river.
During his National Service, Hendry helped form a motorcycle display team for his regiment, so there was an interest in vehicles. Sadly, he was much more interested in booze: it ravaged him. On This is Your Life in 1978 his 77-year-old father looked way healthier, and by the time Hendry died in 1984, aged just 53 but looking 80, his star had fallen a long way.
It was about that time I was watching some late-night telly in Granadaland when a film called Assassin was screened, starring Hendry (trademark grey suit, polo neck, fulsome side whiskers) as a burnt-out hitman doing one last job in an early ʼ70s London of rubbish-strewn back streets, bleak airport hotels and grey pedestrian overpasses. The Green Shield Stamps building in Edgware even features as a vantage point for the assassination. Assassin is an interesting if bleak film that flits between past and present tenses in a contemporary way. Shots of Hendry lying smoking in his hotel room abound, but the only car you see him driving is a Mercedes 200 Fintail. The other vehicular star of Assassin is a MkIV Ford Zodiac, driven enthusiastically by rival liquidator Mike Pratt, post-Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).
The plot of Assassin was a bit beyond my schoolboy paygrade. Apart from some fleeting nudity (which presumably earned it that
