[2] Elphick struggled with an addiction to alcohol; at the height of his problem, he admitted to consuming two litres (½ gallon) of spirits a day,[3] which contributed to his death from a heart attack in 2002.

[1] It has been reported that he stumbled upon acting by chance when, at the age of 15, he took a job as an apprentice electrician at the Chichester Festival Theatre while it was being built.

Elphick was offered a number of places but decided to train at the Central School of Speech and Drama in Swiss Cottage (aged 18), because Olivier had attended there.

In 1984 he played the lead, Fisher, a British detective recalling under hypnosis a dystopian, crumbling Europe and his hunt for a serial killer, in Lars von Trier's Palme D'Or nominated debut film, The Element of Crime.

He briefly appeared in Coronation Street (1974) as Douglas Wormold, son of the landlord Edward, who for many years owned most of the properties in the road.

He played three characters in the popular Granada Television series Crown Court: in 1973 as a defendant; in 1975 as a witness (Frank Hollins, private secretary to a female soprano in the episode Songbirds out of Tune); and from 1975 to 1983 as the barrister Neville Griffiths Q.C.

Here he played alongside Ian Richardson the German forger Gerhard Schulz, who is conscripted into SS Counter Espionage during the Second World War to destroy the British economy by flooding it with forged money.

During breaks from Boon, Elphick continued to act in film with cameo roles in The Krays (1990) and Let Him Have It (1991), and in 1991 he played Des King in Buddy's Song, starring Chesney Hawkes and Roger Daltrey.

For Independent Television company TSW, he took a rare TV presenting role, alongside Don Henderson from The XYY Man, in the food programme The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Cookery.

Elphick went on to play Billy Bones in Ken Russell's televised version of Treasure Island (1995) and Barkis in David Copperfield (1999).

[2] The actor also confessed to having taken cocaine and once, while high on drugs, grabbing a shotgun and chasing a gang of thugs after he had been carjacked near his villa in Portugal.