[4] He appeared frequently in several early drama productions on the BBC's fledgling television service, featuring in such roles as Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice (1938) and Le Bret in Cyrano de Bergerac (1938).

[1] The New Statesman's critic T. C. Worsley wrote of his performance in a star-studded revival of King Lear that "Mr Morell's Kent is the best I remember since Sir Ralph Richardson's.

[6] Cartier was impressed with Morell's performance in this play, and offered him the leading role in a science-fiction serial he was preparing with the writer Nigel Kneale, entitled The Quatermass Experiment.

Morell considered the not-yet-completed script, but decided to decline the offer; the part went instead to his co-star from It Is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer, Reginald Tate.

[6] He did take one of the leading parts in another Cartier and Kneale production the following year, when he played O'Brien in their version of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, opposite Peter Cushing as Winston Smith.

[7] This was a successful and controversial production which provoked much comment and debate;[8] Morell's part in it has been praised for his "coolly menacing performance [that] is at least equal to Cushing's.

[11] With Cushing as Sherlock Holmes, he played Arthur Conan Doyle's character Doctor John H. Watson, in Hammer Film Productions' version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (also 1959).

[12] Morell was particularly keen that his portrayal of Watson should be closer to that originally depicted in Conan Doyle's stories, and away from the bumbling stereotype established by Nigel Bruce's interpretation of the role.

[1] During this time he was involved in a dispute in which Equity threatened to expel Laurence Olivier as a member due to comments he made in a newspaper feature about the possibility of forming a breakaway union.

He and his wife Joan Greenwood had a son, Jason Morell, who also became an actor, appearing in films such as Mrs Brown (1997, as Lord Stanley) and Wilde (also 1997, as Ernest Dowson).