Patrick Mower
Actor
Patrick Mower was born Patrick Archibald Shaw in Oxford, England, on 12 September 1938, the youngest of three brothers. For years he believed he had been born in 1940, only discovering the true date decades later when he learned his birth had never been formally registered. His father, Archibald "Pat" Mower, was a Welsh coal miner; his mother Peggy was English, from Oldham. Several reference books of the 1980s and 1990s mistakenly listed his birthplace as Pontypridd, South Wales, rather than Oxford — an error this article does not repeat, though it points to just how strongly Mower's Welsh paternal line was associated with him.
After training as an engineering draughtsman at the Pressed Steel Company plant in Cowley, Mower won a scholarship to RADA. He came to prominence in the early 1970s as the ruthless government assassin James Cross in the ITV spy series Callan, followed by leading roles as Detective Chief Inspector Tom Haggerty in Special Branch and Detective Superintendent Steve Hackett in Target. In the late 1960s he was seriously considered for the role of James Bond, but was told he was too young at 28.
In 2006, Mower took part in the BBC Wales genealogy series Coming Home, tracing his father's family back to Porth in the Rhondda Valley and uncovering long-buried family secrets, including that his father had been a bigamist — revelations he later wrote about candidly in his 2007 autobiography, Patrick Mower: My Story.
Since 2000, Mower has been a fixture of ITV's Emmerdale in the role of Rodney Blackstock, one of the soap's longest-running characters, capping a screen career spanning more than half a century across film, television and stage.