Michael Billington (actor)
British actor (1941–2005)
Michael Billington (24 December 1941 – 3 June 2005) was a British film and television actor. He was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England.
Career
In 1966 Billington appeared in Incident at Vichy at the Phoenix Theatre in London.
Television
He was best known for his role as Colonel Paul Foster in the 1970 science fiction TV series UFO; being chosen by Sylvia Anderson after she saw him in A Change of Mind on The Prisoner.
He created the character of Daniel Fogarty from 1971 to 1974 in the historical drama The Onedin Line. He also appeared as Sergeant Jacko Jackson of the Royal Wessex Rangers in the series Spearhead and as Czar Nicholas II in the ITV drama series Edward the Seventh (1975). He played gangster John Coogan in one episode ("The Rack") of The Professionals.
Billington lived in the U.S. from around 1979 until 1985. Although he had some good roles, notably as Count Louis Dardinay in The Quest (1982), he did not reach the same level of success as he had in Britain. Billington's last major TV role came in the 1986 BBC drama The Collectors, but his final appearance was in an episode of early 1990s TV series Maigret as a villain.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Michael Billington (actor)” as british actor (1941–2005). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british actor (1941–2005). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q167094. VIAF identifies the subject as 34666365. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1941, 2005, 1966 and 1970.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Billington (actor)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.