Born in London in June 1927, Geoffrey was demobbed from the Royal Marines in 1947 and worked in an imports office and as an accountant. He became involved in amateur dramatics through a girlfriend. Another friend persuaded him to venture into acting and his first job in the early Fifties, while he was still living at home, was as an unpaid assistant stage manager. After three months, the theatre paid him £3 a week.

His long, lugubrious features, which easily fold themselves into his distinctive gruff, glowering expression, made regular appearances on TV in the Fifties and Sixties before the keen fly-fisherman hooked the role of the late Leonard Rossiter's brother-in-law in The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. He went on to star with Wendy Craig in Carla Lane's soaring success Butterflies, in BBC One's The Savages, by Men Behaving Badly creator Simon Nye, and the children's classic Stig Of The Dump.

Geoffrey and his wife, Sally, married in 1963 and have two children, Charles and Harriet, and grandson Billy.