Ray Reardon, six-time world snooker champion who helped to bring mass popularity to his sport – obituary
He survived a mining accident to become a superlative ambassador as Pot Black made snooker a favourite with the television-viewing public
![Ray Reardon: he was known as 'Dracula' for his widow's peak](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2024/07/20/TELEMMGLPICT000386224566_17214897595970_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqP5cCLU3tGUKNTdPSRn7muthC1is0rrp-PSgpUfsOYQU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
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He survived a mining accident to become a superlative ambassador as Pot Black made snooker a favourite with the television-viewing public
He also worked in the music business, and after the 1993 fatal shooting of the Notorious BIG he found premiums skyrocketing for rap acts
Volatile but popular, he went on to become an inspirational team director, forging an all-conquering partnership with Jacques Anquetil
HMRC classified his art as ‘electrical devices’ and thus subject to full VAT, but relented after a campaign by an art gallery
He ran a UN office in Gaza, where he would protect his staff from the threats of Hamas leaders by slipping the leaders bottles of whisky
The legendary network set up to report on Japanese movements represents one of the most illustrious chapters in Australia’s military history
He won two brass band World Championships and in 1973 was crowned Champion Soloist of Great Britain
At the peak of Beverly Hills, 90210, she could not visit malls without being accosted, and she spawned her own Shannen Doherty Barbie doll
Her appearance at the Oxford Union attracted a record 2,000 undergraduates, even though it coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall
His prize as men’s singles champion was a modest £25 voucher for Lillywhite’s in Piccadilly, where he bought a sweater
The planes in the original mission had flown at 60 feet, but the director wanted Souter and co to go down to a ‘bloody dangerous’ 25 feet
It took him seven weeks to ice the cake for Queen Elizabeth’s golden wedding anniversary
Leading an infantry platoon in a night attack near Monte Cassino, he advanced with a sub-machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other
She was zealously promoted by her British lover, the impresario Jack Hylton, but ‘her tiny voice’ was booed off stage in the West End
‘They said I could never finish, so I finished first,’ she said after victory in the 1962 Argentine Touring Car Grand Prix
He singled out for criticism the German foreign minister, who had been ‘almost fanatical in his support for an independent Croatia’
‘We were told that we could not play any Tchaikovsky because the Chinese and the Russians were at loggerheads’
Their biggest hit, Stuck in the Middle with You, was famously used by Quentin Tarantino to accompany a torture scene in Reservoir Dogs
The navigator was awarded the DFC for ‘exemplary gallantry’ after his Mosquito crew sank one U-boat and seriously damaged another
As an unmarried Catholic mother in London in 1965, she said, ‘I honestly felt if I’d murdered someone it might have been more acceptable’