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At the close of the last century, accomplished character actor Malcolm Terris received long-awaited good news: He would finally play the title character in a major production, a 2000 made-for-TV mystery to be filmed as part of the highly popular Agatha Christie series of films about Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot. Unfortunately, the title of the film was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In other words, Terris got to star as a corpus delicti. No matter: He did his duty de rigueur (in this case, rigor mortis) as in all of his TV, film, and stage productions since the 1960s. Terris got to die in another major production, The Bounty (1984), in which he drank himself to death as the ship's surgeon while Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) imbibed an island girl and Captain Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) swilled sadism. Terris no doubt learned his talent for keeling over as a Shakespearean actor. As a senate officer in a 1965 production of Othello and a captain in a 1969 production of Hamlet, he observed the untimely keel-over deaths of practically all of the major characters. Terris' forte is TV, mostly series and miniseries, including appearances in such popular productions as Catherine Cookson's The Secret (2000), Family Affairs (1997), Our Friends in the North (1996), Vanity Fair (1987), Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986), Return to Treasure Island (1985), Reilly: The Ace of Spies (1983), and Dr. Who (1963). Before entering the acting profession, Terris was a reporter for a newspaper in Sunderland, England, where he was born in 1941.