Ray Barrett was born Raymond Charles Barrett on May 2, 1927 in Brisbane, Queensland. He is an Australian actor.
Ray Barrett was one of the more popular leading men on British television in the 1960s.
He was fascinated by radio from an early age and won an on-air talent competition in 1939. At the age of 12 he won an Eisteddfod, which was broadcast on 4BH radio, with a musical monologue about a dog named 'Paddy'. This was to set him on a different path from his dream of boatbuilding. Many acting jobs on Australian radio followed, but he left Brisbane for Sydney in 1954, and then travelled further from Australia to England in 1957.
He was given character and tough guy roles from an unusually young age. In Britain he played one of the lead roles in the British TV series Emergency Ward 10, and later played one of the main characters, hard-nosed oilman Peter Thornton, in the long-running BBC series about the oil industry The Troubleshooters (1965 to 1971). He was also the voice of a number of characters in Gerry Anderson marionette series: he voiced Commander Shore and Titan in Stingray, and later was John Tracy, The Hood and many of the extra characters in Thunderbirds. He appeared in the Doctor Who serial The Rescue in 1965.
It was only in the decades that followed that he emerged to big-screen stardom in his native country. He won the 2005 Australian Film Institute Awards Longford Life Achievement Award.
His last appearance was in "Australia" in 2008.
Barrett died at the age of 82, in a hospital on the Gold Coast in Southport, Queensland on September 8, 2009 after suffering a brain haemorrhage.
