The actor Bryan Mosley, who has died aged 67, was a stalwart of Coronation Street for 38 years, playing the cornershop-keeper Alf Roberts -- a name picked at random long before anyone in Granada Television could have heard of a real-life Alfred Roberts in whose cornershop the infant Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, had acquired her free-market politics.

Mosley's debut came in episode 18, only nine weeks into the run of what is still the doyen of our soap operas, but he was already a busy actor and not until six years later, in 1967, was he persuaded to become a regular denizen of the Street. Alf's wife at this time never actually appeared, but when she died Mosley won high praise for a scene in which he broke down as he tried to tell a neighbour.

Alf married again, was widowed again, had other little affairs of the heart and ventured into local politics. Bryan Mosley settled comfortably into the characterisation of a good man careful with his brass and a bit holier-than-thou. He was himself "just the sort of bloke", as the then producer Howard Baker put it, "who would be a Sunday-school teacher". He was also very popular with the show's writers. According to John Finch, an earlier producer, this was because he was so authentically northern.

In fact he was born in Leeds and made his stage debut at the age of 10, as the rear end of a pantomime cow. His first professional engagement, after National Service and training at the Esme Church Northern Theatre School, continued the bovine connection. It was at the tiny Byre Theatre in St Andrews, Fife, converted from a cow barn. Seasons in Perth, Harrogate, York and, Derby brought him steadily back to his roots.

On screen, he won parts in all the gritty North-country movies of the 1960s Charlie Bubbles, A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life and, most significantly, the Tyneside thriller Get Carter, in which he was finally hurled to his death from the top of a tower block by Michael Caine. His television work also inclined towards action series such as No Hiding Place, The Saint,. Z Cars and The Avengers, all sharpening the subsidiary enthusiasm of his career, the craft of realistic fights and feats of daring.

He was a founder member of the British Society of Fight Arrangers. He coached Terence Stamp in his glittering display of swordsmanship as Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd. Mosley also endowed a stage-fencing award at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

In later life he began to suffer from cardiac troubles, and early this year was "written out" of Coronation Street when Alf Roberts died, rather pointedly, from a heart attack Mosley himself, a Roman Catholic, had been on a pilgrimage to Lourdes and protested that he felt fine. He is survived by his wife Norma, their three sons and three daughters.