The resurrection of Reg Hollis: The Bill's nerdiest cop reveals how his life unravelled in catastrophic fashion

By Frances Hardy for the Daily Mail
Updated: 16:14 EDT, 19 August 2011

Success is never sweeter than when it follows swiftly on the heels of disaster. Just such a reversal of fortune has transformed the life of actor Jeff Stewart - best known as put-upon PC Reg Hollis in the classic TV series The Bill.

Three years ago, his career had stalled and depression had tipped him to the edge of an abyss: he lay in his dressing room, his wrists haemorrhaging blood, having attempted suicide after his role in the police drama was axed.

Today, we meet and his mood is euphoric. He has just won the Best Actor award at the Manhattan Film Festival for his part in a new independent film, Under Jakob’s Ladder.

Transformation: Jeff Stewart's new look is in stark contrast to the uniformed television character he played for almost 25 years

It is an unlikely transformation. For almost a quarter of a century, Jeff was a soap staple; one of the original cast of ITV’s longest-running drama.

As PC Reg Hollis, he was the most downtrodden cop in TV history, his cockney nasal whine as familiar as the show’s theme tune. Then came his summary dismissal in 2008 - followed sharply by his freefall towards oblivion.

But now, he has shrugged off Reg’s persona - and with it his familiar image - to embark on a late-blossoming career as a serious film actor. He is 55 and Hollywood is beckoning. Even Jeff is pinching himself.

Buffoon: PC Reg Hollis was often the subject of ridicule at Sun Hill Police

It isn’t the first time he has pulled himself back from the brink. He also reveals that, like his friend the late Kevin Lloyd - who played Tosh Lines in The Bill for a decade from 1988 - for 13 years he was heavily dependent on alcohol. While Lloyd, however, died as a result of his drinking, Jeff is in recovery.

‘I truly cracked my problem on January 27, 1997,’ he says. ‘Alcoholics never forget the date when they had their last drink.’

If the graph of Jeff’s life has been a series of rises and falls, the steep trajectory of his most recent ascent looks irreversible. Jeff, who had arrived in New York early to attend last month’s award ceremony, whiled away a few hours walking around, before taking a bus to the Broadway venue with no expectation of winning anything.

‘When they called my name it felt unreal, like an out-of-body experience,’ he says.

‘I felt almost giddy. I was sitting down at the time, which was helpful because I think the surprise would have floored me.’

He smiles wryly. ‘Then there was a sort of tingling from the top of my head to the end of my fingers. It was literally a shiver, a moment so special I felt I was in a little cocoon.

‘I thought: “Did I hear right? Was it my name?” Then I felt hands on my shoulders and people were congratulating me.

‘I hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech. I improvised. I remember saying: “This is absolutely extraordinary.” And I didn’t cry, but I did “fill up”, as we Scots say. My bottom eyelid was brimming with tears and I had to tilt my head back to stop them flowing.’

He adds: ‘What will it do for my career? I’m not sure yet. I’m still processing all of it, still asking myself: “Did it actually happen?” ’

Jeff describes a similar sense of disorientation when he learned three years ago that his role as PC Hollis - a part he had played since the drama began in 1984 - was ending because the show was being revamped.

Regular favourites: Jeff (rear left) with other members of The Bill, which ran for more than 25 years

In the event, the make-over proved unsuccessful: the programme survived  barely two years after Jeff’s sacking. But the news of his character’s demise shocked him so profoundly he tried to kill himself.

Jeff recalls: ‘I’d been asked to see the show’s producer, Jonathan Young, who had the terrifying task of breathing new life into The Bill. He told me the decision to end my contract was financial. With my wages [reported to be £150,000 a year], he could employ three or four juniors.

‘He said: "You’re a cracking actor and I like you, but unfortunately we’re not going to be continuing your contract.” I said: “I understand.” What else can you say?

‘I suppose I thought I did understand. But I didn’t. I went to get a glass of water and walked back to my dressing room. I was in a state of shock.

‘I took the news so badly because it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was already feeling pretty desperate. A good friend had let me down in my personal life and I’d just spent Christmas at home alone.

'It’s a dangerous time to be on your own and in hindsight I should have taken a holiday, gone off to America, or to see my family in Aberdeen. But I didn’t. I’d worked solidly on The Bill for 50 weeks; I wasn’t in a happy position.’

Unmarried, Jeff has had a string of failed relationships. He split from long-term partner Katharine Weikop, with whom he shared a flat in South London, in 2004, before embarking on a fling with Joan Collins’ daughter Katy Kass.

The good life: At the height of his popularity, Jeff (right) began a relationship with Katy Kass (centre), daughter of Hollywood actress Joan Collins (left). Also pictured is Miss Collins' brother, Bill

When the couple’s photograph subsequently appeared in a  red top tabloid leaving a risque club together, Ms Collins said Jeff had ‘corrupted’ her daughter.

No longer in a relationship and entirely focused on his career, Jeff found the shock at being sacked from the job he loved was too much to bear.

He pauses, unable to launch into the next chapter of the story. It is as if the memory is choking him.

Glamour couple: But after Jeff and Katy split up, her famous mother said that Jeff had corrupted her daughter

‘So I went back to my dressing room and I took it out on myself,’ he says, preferring euphemism to graphic description.

‘So you slashed your wrists?’ His nod is barely perceptible. What did you use? He declines to answer. ‘It’s too gruesome, too bloody,’ he says quietly.

And then he tries to rationalise his actions.

‘Your world has just collapsed,’ he explains. ‘I’d been in The Bill for 24 years: you feel you’re left with nothing but emptiness and desolation.

‘There was no real logic or thought behind what I did. I know I blacked out twice. It was like drifting off to sleep and then pulling yourself back into consciousness again. Then the sensible part of my brain, my instinct for survival, seemed to kick in. I remember thinking: “If this happens a third time, I won’t be here.” ’

Newspaper reports at the time claimed that the suicide attempt was stoked by worries over online gambling debts, although Jeff denies this.

‘I feel sorry for people who experience the sensations I did - that feeling of drifting into a deep sleep - and who dislike being alive so much that they fail to heed the last message, the voice of common sense. I think for those who choose oblivion, it is the idea of the long, long rest that draws them.

‘But something pulled me back. It was a reasoning voice. It was quite clear, like a bell that dings in your head. Some things about what happened will always be vague, but I know I picked up the phone and spoke to the man on the studio’s front desk.

‘I can’t remember much after that other than instantly feeling better, as if a corner had been turned. I recall someone fussing around me and then I was in hospital.’

His wounds were stitched and the next day, back at his home in Richmond, south-west London, friends and family rallied round. While at the time there were reports he may have attempted suicide again, when police visited the house following concern from a member of the public, Jeff claims he felt better immediately.

Always on duty: Jeff had been on set for 50 weeks without a break when he was told that his contract would not be renewed

‘My brother Paul came over from Paris and my mother Ruby arrived. Friends and work colleagues called. There were flowers and baskets of fruit. It was like having a cool cloth pressed to an aching head. Immediately, I began to feel better.’

However, at the time, the prospect of working again seemed remote. He recalls: ‘By the third day people were saying “You’ll get another job. Something good will come out of this”, and I was thinking: “I suppose it could, but I can’t see how.” ’

Before The Bill, Jeff had roles in Crossroads, Doctor Who and Hi De Hi. He left The Drama School in North London after just a year, he says, ‘to get on with the business of becoming an actor’.

Just five weeks after he came perilously close to ending his life, Jeff was invited to audition for a low-budget film called Under Jakob’s Ladder. He seized the chance to work again, even though the pay was small - the film cost just £130,000 to make - and three months later he learned he had won the central role of Jakob Seel.

The story is a true one: Jakob Seel was a German teacher, living under the oppression of Communism in Forties Russia, who felt a profound sense of worthlessness when he was dismissed from his post as a teacher in a Soviet village.

Unrecognisable: After being ditched from the show, Jeff deliberately set about changing his appearance - prompting concern that he had become an eccentric recluse

He agreed to say a prayer at the funeral of a friend - breaking anti-religious laws by doing so - and was thrown into prison. As his cellmates were executed, one by one, Seel formed a choir to distract him from the terror of being taken out and shot. Through it, he rediscovered his sense of self-worth.

The parallels are striking. Like Jeff, Seel - sacked from the job that gave him status and a raison d’etre - finds salvation in the most inauspicious of circumstances.

Even before he prepared for his role as Seel, Jeff began to resemble his character physically — and looked as different from his old alter ego Reg Hollis as Sun Hill is from Hollywood.

Reg’s hair was always short and neatly-barbered, so too was Jeff’s. But when he was dispatched from The Bill he stopped going to the barber’s and his hair became so wayward and unruly that speculation grew he had become an eccentric hermit.

Today he dismisses the idea, laughing: ‘I certainly didn’t turn into a recluse. It was just that for all the years I played Reg I’d had my hair cut into his short, precise style and gelled into place. I loved playing him, but I wanted to distance myself from him by growing my hair.’

The likeness between Jeff and Jakob Seel was so remarkable that even Seel’s sons Roberto and Mann — who produced and directed the film — were impressed by it.

I meet Jeff on the set of his latest film, Serve Cold. He looks fit and lean in brown Chelsea boots, a camel coat and corduroy jeans. His steel-grey hair is shoulder length now; his face clean-shaven.

He sips on a glass of water and says — after his years of excessive drinking — that he has now reached the comfortable state where he no longer craves alcohol.

‘If we were at a party, I’d happily bring you an alcoholic drink and myself a Diet Coke,’ he says. ‘You know that you’ve really got the better of the problem when you feel like that.’

When did he realise his drinking was out of control? ‘I used to have three-day hangovers,’ he says. ‘The first day was dreadful, the second just slightly better and only by the third was I starting to improve.’

The day when he realised he had to stop drinking entirely is etched in his memory. ‘I’d gone with Mark Wingett, who played DC Jim Carver in The Bill, to a re-launch of Quadrophenia (Wingett starred in the original 1979 film).

I had so much to drink there and felt so dreadful the next day I thought: “That has to be the end of that”. ’

There had been failed attempts to stop earlier; now Jeff describes himself as ‘an alcoholic in recovery’.

He seems to have achieved a happy equilibrium: his new lease of professional life has given him optimism and buoyancy. Although his career is on the up, however, there is still one personal ambition he hopes to achieve: he does not think it is too late to become a father.

‘I don’t necessarily want to get married,’ he says, ‘But I’d like to have a partner, a special lady, and have a family. Yes, it would be nice to have children one day,’ he smiles.

After all he’s been through, and the strength of will with which he’s turned his life around, it is impossible not to wish this troubled yet talented actor well.