Bob Hewis

Bob Hewis (born Robert John Hewis in Scothern) was an actor, musician and writer who appeared as the guest character Ray in EastEnders throughout 1987.

Bob attended his village school and then De Aston grammar in Market Rasen. He worked as a farm labourer before attending Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln. In the 1970s he became a well-known singer on the local folk-club circuit and was a founding member of the professional touring repertory company Great Eastern Stage in 1976.

Bob's many theatre credits included Macduff in Macbeth; Macheath in The Threepenny Opera; Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew (at the Everyman, Liverpool); the Actor in The Woman in Black; Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird; Bob Crass in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (at the Birmingham Rep); and Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He also acted at the Old Vic in 1980 with Peter O'Toole in his infamous Macbeth and played Launcelot Gobbo in Timothy West's Merchant of Venice.

Theatre work took Bob to Moscow, Kiev, Jerusalem, Alabama and Berlin. His TV appearances included Coronation Street and Brookside. He also wrote: he adapted Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart for radio and stage and wrote Distant Voices, an original work incorporating seven of Tennyson's Lincolnshire dialect poems. He was a member of the Labyrinth Poets in Vienna, who gave regular public readings.

In 1996 and 1997 he performed at the English Theatre in Vienna, as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream and as Oliver and Touchstone in As You Like It; he loved the city, and settled there in 1998, working as a performer, musician, writer and translator.