PETER ADAMSONPeter Adamson, who died on 17 January, 2002 aged 72, was known to millions as ‘Coronation Street’s rough diamond Len Fairclough.As the Liverpudlian ex-Navy builder, he starred in TV’s longest-running soap opera from 1961 to 1983 and celebrated Fairclough’s fictional death by delivering an obituary live on morning television dressed as an undertaker.Peter Adamson was born in Allerton, Liverpool, on 16 February, 1930. The youngest of six children, he left school at 14 to take a job in a solicitor’s office but was later sacked for drumming on his desk with pens and an inkwell.He then worked for some time as a commercial artist before moving to London in 1948, where he enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.After only two months, however, he left and instead returned to the north to join a theatre in Sale, Cheshire. Further to this, he spent five years as a stage manager with the Fortescue Players at Bury, Lancashire, and set up his own repertory company, acting in and producing plays in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare.In 1956 he made his television debut as the host of an ITV variety show, before going on to appear in the Granada dramas ‘Skyport’ and ‘Knight Errant’.He made his first appearance in TV soap ‘Coronation Street’ in 1960, just two months after it had begun. His initial 12-episode contract as Len Fairclough, on a salary of £10 a week, soon rose to the-then huge sum of £10,000 a year and saw Mr Adamson became a full-time cast member.He laterenjoyed a brief run on the London stage in ‘Dial M for Murder’. He also appeared on TV’s ‘This Is Your Life’ in 1981.He spent his last years in relative obscurity in a rented flat in Lincolnshire. He died from advanced stomach cancer on 17 January, 2002, at the age of 72.
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