Gareth Lewis was born and raised in Y Felinheli, a village on the Menai Strait near Bangor, Gwynedd, in the mid-1940s. He began performing as a boy of thirteen for BBC radio in Bangor, and in 1970 was given a full-time contract with BBC Wales, becoming one of the last actors of his generation to hold such a contract.
In 1975 Lewis joined the very first series of the S4C soap opera Pobol y Cwm as Meic Pierce, a young photographer from Anglesey. The character became one of the show's most enduring figures, running the village cafe and the Deri pub over the decades and growing from comic relief into a much more serious role. Lewis played Meic, on and off, for around forty years, finally leaving the series in 2015 when the character was written out following a storyline involving terminal illness.
Away from Cwmderi, Lewis provided voices for characters in Sam Tan, the Welsh-language version of Fireman Sam, between 1987 and 1994, and made other appearances across Welsh-language film and television, including the 1978 BBC Wales serial Hawkmoor. He is married to Ann Owen, a director on Pobol y Cwm, and published his autobiography, Hogyn o'r Felin, in 2016.
Note on this record: for many years this page carried career details (a role in the ITV soap Emmerdale and the sitcom Birds of a Feather) and a reader comment claiming a family link to actor Hywel Bennett. Research shows those facts in fact belong to a different performer with a similar name, Alun Lewis (born Alun Lewis Bennett), who is Hywel Bennett's real brother and who played Vic Windsor in Emmerdale and Darryl Stubbs in Birds of a Feather. The two men are not related, and this page has been corrected to reflect the career of Gareth Lewis, the Pobol y Cwm and Sam Tan actor from Y Felinheli.