William John Phillips MC was born on 20 July 1914 in Birmingham, England, and studied English at the University of Birmingham before launching his acting career at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the 1930s. His career was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he served with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the Normandy campaign and was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in 1944.
After the war Phillips built a long and distinguished stage career, appearing at the Old Vic and Bristol Old Vic in major Shakespearean roles, including the Ghost in Peter Brook's 1955 production of Hamlet opposite Paul Scofield and Prospero in a 1959 staging of The Tempest. He continued to work in the West End and regional theatre into the 1980s.
On screen, Phillips is best remembered as Chief Superintendent Robins in the long-running BBC police drama Z-Cars (1962-1978) and its spin-off Softly, Softly, a role that made him a familiar face in British living rooms for well over a decade. He also appeared in Sergeant Cork, played the Duke of Norfolk in Laurence Olivier's Richard III (1955), and took character roles in films including Village of the Damned (1960) and Quadrophenia (1979).
Phillips has long been listed on this site as an actor with a connection to Wales, but a review of the available biographical record - including his Wikipedia entry, his 1995 Independent obituary, and his archived family papers - finds no confirmed Welsh birthplace or ancestry. He was born in Birmingham and died in Oswestry, Shropshire, a Welsh border town with historic links to the old kingdom of Powys, where he had settled with his wife, Pauline (nee Jones), in his later years. We are correcting the record here rather than repeating an unverified claim, while keeping the entry in our archive of British acting talent with links, real or presumed, to Wales.