Stephens first appeared in films playing Major Lench in the 1956 John Boulting offering, Private's Progress, which starred Richard Attenborough as an innocent young recruit who gets involved with a gang of Army spivs.
[2] In the same year, he also made his first major television appearance as Hassan Ben Ali in "Albania", an episode of the ITC Entertainment adventure serial The Count of Monte Cristo.
[6] He appeared in two TV series in 1958 – the 6-part "demob" saga from the BBC called Fair Game, and the popular police programme Dixon of Dock Green (playing Todd in "The Key of the Nick").
He had been approached by film producers Robert Franklyn and Sam Abarbanel to make the Western in the early 1950s, and shooting took place in California and Oklahoma, with the final edit ready by 1955.
[12] His work in the early 1960s included regular appearances in some well-known productions for television, such as Maigret (1960), Danger Man (1961 and 1966) and the 1962 mini-series of Oliver Twist (featuring a very young Melvyn Hayes as the Artful Dodger) when Stephens played Mr Limbkins.
[17] In television that year, he made appearances in single episodes of more anthology-style series, namely The Man in Room 17, Out of the Unknown, An Enemy of the State, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The character Cyril was said to bear a remarkable resemblance to William George Bunter, whom Hamilton wrote many books about under the pen name Frank Richards.
[24] In the Wednesday Play series, he appeared as Captain Carruthers in the final part of Alan Plater's 1968 trilogy, To See How Far It Is, about a "humble pen-pusher in a cardboard factory" who, in his attempts to brighten up his life, ends up surrounded by "a little feminine company" on a cruise ship.
[31] After portraying Don Gutierre in the BBC's epic historical drama The Six Wives of Henry VIII,[32] he made a cinema film alongside Jean Simmons called Say Hello to Yesterday, in which he played a businessman.