Barry Frederick Howard, (9 July 1937 — 28 April 2016), was a British actor best known for playing Barry Stuart-Hargreaves in Hi-de-Hi!.
During his time in the Royal Navy, he found himself longing to act in the theatre. During his career, Howard appeared in many guest roles on TV in shows such as Terry and June, You Rang, M'Lord?, The House of Windsor, and Dad.
He and John Inman worked together as pantomime dames and appeared in a production of Salad Days together. David Croft took notice of the two's talent, which got the pair of them roles in his future sitcoms - Inman as Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? and Howard as Barry, a snooty ballroom dancer, in Hi-de-Hi!.
Howard stuck with the show for the first seven series, but as he was growing tired of how repetitive his role was and of the quality of the scripts, he turned to the drink and got up to misbehaviour on the set. He was let go after Series 7, with Barry being Put on a Bus and replaced with Ben Aris' Julian Dalrymple-Sykes (a One-Off Character previously introduced in Series 5 as a warning to Howard that if he kept causing trouble he could easily be replaced). However, Howard reprised the role of Barry in the stage adaptation several years later in 2010.
He died of blood cancer at the age of 78.
Works on TV Tropes he appeared in:
Series- Terry and June, episode "Writing on the Wall" (1979) — Cochrane
- Hi-de-Hi!, 46 episodes (1980-86) — Barry Stuart-Hargreaves
- You Rang, M'Lord?, episode "Royal Flush" (1990) — Count Maximilian Zarkhov
- Beautiful People, episode "How I Got My Water Feature" (2009) — Monsieur Antoine
- Doctor Who, 1 episode of 2-episode story "The End of Time" (2009) — Oliver Barnes
