Ian Pepperell, best known for playing Roy Tucker in The Archers, has died aged 53, the BBC has announced.
The actor, who played the hotelier in the long-running BBC Radio 4 drama for 22 years, died on Friday following a long illness.
He also acted in numerous stage productions and appeared in BBC soap opera EastEnders for a short stint during his career.
The Archers editor Jeremy Howe said: “Ian was the perfect Archers actor – he loved being part of an ensemble, relished the camaraderie and gossip of the Green Room, and had a seemingly effortlessly fine tuned vocal technique.
Image: Ian Pepperell is best known for playing Roy Tucker in The Archers. Pic: Gary Moyes/BBC
“Like all the very best radio actors he could think on his feet and change the way he played a scene in the blink of an eye.
“Thanks to Ian’s brilliance, he created in Roy a character who managed to face in two directions simultaneously in almost every scene he played.”
The character featured in a number of dramatic storylines within the show, including a New Year’s Eve episode in which Roy asked Hayley Jordan, played by Lucy Davis, to marry him.
Mr Howe said: “He captured Roy as both genial and anxious, funny and sad, easy-going and permanently stressed – a man who could hold down with ease a top job, yet who always carried with him Hamlet’s sense of failure.
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“It all made perfect sense because of Ian’s uncanny and laser-guided ability to find humour in the emotional scenes and find pathos in the comedy that he always played so unerringly well.
“Ian had a lot more gas in the tank and was desperate to return to Ambridge once his health permitted.
“It is tragic that he died in his prime, we will miss him dearly and our hearts go out to his family and friends and everyone who knew him.
“Ambridge loved Roy – The Archers and our millions of listeners loved Ian’s Roy Tucker.”
In the theatre world, he played Hamlet for the Oxford Stage Company and Richard III at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester.
The actor also appeared in a number of episodes of EastEnders in 1993 and featured in police drama The Bill.
It is “pretty surreal”, Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon admits, finding herself at the top of The New York Times bestsellers list.
When I meet the actress alongside her co-writer, best-selling author Harlan Coben, overnight the pair have learned that their thriller is now at number one.
He jokes: “I was texting her last night and saying you’ll now have to call yourself number one bestselling novelist, forget about Oscar winner!”
Image: Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben told Katie Spencer about their novel Gone Before Goodbye
As one of the most successful authors in the world, Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground.
Not content with running a hugely successful production company responsible for a string of hits, as well as one of the most successful book clubs in the world, she explains she felt compelled to give writing a try.
“People want you to stay in your lane… as a creative person I think it’s impossible to just choose one kind of life.
“Creativity is infinite and who I was as a creative person when I was 20 is very different from the person I am now at 49.”
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Gone Before Goodbye, a thriller about a talented surgeon who finds herself caught up in a deadly conspiracy, is the result of Witherspoon daring to put her head above the parapet.
Image: Witherspoon says she felt compelled to give writing a try
Coben admits he was “a little wary” at first.
“I don’t co-write novels but when she made the pitch and started talking about it, I was like ‘dang that’s good, we can do something with that’.”
While countless celebrities work with ghostwriters, Coben says: “I said to her from day one ‘it’s only going to be you and me in here… no third person in here, I don’t do that’. So every word you [read] comes from Reese and me.”
Image: Coben has sold over 80 million books to date, while for Witherspoon this is new ground
Witherspoon explains: “He was like ‘if we’re going to do this, it’s going to have to be at a really high level because people going to expect a lot, so our bar was really high.”
“I said to her, in the beginning, novels are like a sausage,” Coben laughs. “You might like the final taste, but you don’t want to see how it was made and Reese got to see the full sausage getting made here.”
When it came to writing, Coben says they “fell into a rhythm right away”, working together in three-hour stints, “back and forth with a yellow legal pad – what about this? What about that?”
Image: Coben says they ‘fell into a rhythm right away’
Witherspoon says it “feels really deeply personal” to have their work now in print.
“Usually, as an actor, I walk into other people’s worlds and it’s already set up… but this was creating the whole world with Harlan and just from beginning to end feels very personal.”
While the story seems an obvious fit for being adapted to the screen, perhaps with a certain blonde actress in the leading role, Coben says that was never their intention.
“The biggest, biggest mistake novelists make when you write a book is to say ‘this would make a really great movie’. A book is a book, a movie is a movie, and we both focused on wanting this to be just a great reading experience.”
Given that their collaboration is already selling in big numbers, will the pair team up again to write a second?
Witherspoon says: “Let’s just see what people think of this one first.”
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Associate professor of neurology Dr Laura Stein told Sky’s US partner NBC News: ” The most well-described risk factors include a predisposition [family history of aneurysm], high blood pressure, cigarette smoking and inflammation.”
She went on to explain that most fatal ruptured aneurysms are in the brain, killing about one in three patients.
“When it’s a blood vessel that’s in the head and it bleeds, there’s a much higher risk of having a very bad problem just because the brain is enclosed in a fixed space,” Dr Stein added.
Low-risk aneurysms are monitored by doctors for growth or abnormalities, and there are a series of potential treatment options for those considered dangerous.
Elsewhere in The Kardashians clip, Kim admitted that her ex-husband Kanye West will be in her life “no matter what” because of the four kids they share together.