The actor Nicholas Ball, who has died aged 78, landed his biggest television role when he starred as a down-at-heel cockney private eye in the ITV series Hazell in 1978.

James Hazell starts his own detective agency after being invalided out of the police and turning to the bottle, triggering the end of his marriage. He soon becomes embroiled in violence as he tackles London low life, with the gritty reality extending to the crime-buster taking beatings himself.

“It would have been impossible to make a series like this without violence,” said Ball. “We have tried to show that violence hurts. It’s important to make violence look as repulsive as possible. If a bloke takes a kicking, he doesn’t jump up and run politely down the road.”

Hazell was based on novels written by the journalist Gordon Williams and the footballer-turned-manager Terry Venables under the joint pen name PB Yuill. “He’s new, he’s tough, he’s Hazell,” proclaimed publicity from the production company, Thames Television, whose controller of drama, Verity Lambert, enthused about the books’ “cockney sense of humour” and the potential for showing “the underbelly of London”.

That included seedy scenes shot in Acton, the East End and Clapton greyhound stadium, alongside stylish location filming in Soho, but nothing could stop ratings falling from a peak of 17m after the BBC scheduled a season of Robert Redford films against Hazell in 1979 during its second series.

The programme ended and Ball struggled to bounce back – at the same time as his personal life was falling apart. In 1978, he married Pamela Stephenson, the New Zealand-born actor about to find fame in Britain in the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News. The marriage was over after 18 months and television offers were thin on the ground for Ball, who struggled financially.

He continued to pop up in character parts on television, but failed to scale the heights he might have expected. Nevertheless, he had a leading role as Detective Chief Inspector Nick Hall of the Flying Squad in the third series of Thief Takers (1995), then played Garry Ryan, the rock star-turned-chair of Earls Park FC who is responsible for the death of its manager, in the final series of Footballers’ Wives (2006) – a part he first took in the spin-off Footballers’ Wive$: Extra Time (2005-06). “He was a complete rat, firing people and sleeping with other men’s wives,” said Ball.

Shortly afterwards, he played another screen villain, Terry Bates, leader of a gang of football hooligans, in EastEnders on and off between 2007 and 2009. Most memorably, while storming the Queen Vic to look for his reformed former accomplice Jase Dyer (Stephen Lord), the gang smashed the pub up and took Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor) and others hostage. Later, Terry fatally stabbed Jase and was jailed for life. His death in 2019, off screen, gave the soap the storyline of his funeral taking place in the fictional Walford.

Ball was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, to Dorothy (nee Frith, known as Maggie), a teacher, and Robert Ball, an electrical engineer, and grew up in Hastings, East Sussex. On leaving school at 15, he acted with the amateur group at the Stables theatre, Hastings, for five years while working by day as a lorry driver, labourer and deckchair attendant.

When a friend applied to train at Bristol Old Vic theatre school, he did the same and both were accepted. While there, Ball took a small role as a despatch rider in a 1968 episode of the famous TV series Z Cars.

In 1969, he joined the repertory company at Hull Arts Centre for its opening play, Don’t Build a Bridge, Drain the River, by Alan Plater. Then, he was an early member of the Portable theatre company, a co-operative – founded by the writer David Hare and the director Tony Bicât – that toured Britain and Europe. This was followed by a stint at the Royal Court theatre, London, in 1975.

A year later, he made an impression on screen with a run as Mr Minter in Thames Television’s afternoon marriage-guidance serial Couples. It included a 10-minute monologue – “a husband telling his side of the marriage story,” Ball recalled.

This led him to be cast in Thames’s 1976 peak-time series The Crezz as Colin Pitman, an East Ender who makes it to the top of the advertising tree, then has to deal with a drink problem. Unfortunately for Ball, the programme – set in a west London crescent, with each episode focusing on a different household – failed to capture viewers’ imaginations, but Hazell followed shortly afterwards, with Ball beating John Nettles and others to the starring role.

Then, apart from other dramas, he made appearances in sitcoms: as a professor in The Young Ones in 1982; a film producer in Colin’s Sandwich in 1990; a simulant (“a kind of terminator,” he explained) in Red Dwarf in 1991; and a client of David (Robert Bathurst) in Cold Feet in 2000 who takes a liking to Karen’s mother (Mel Martin).

Ball’s later film roles included a gangster in Out of Depth (2000), the contract killer Harry Webster in The Krays: Dead Man Walking (2018) and Charlie Kray in A New Breed of Criminal (2023).

Ball and Stephenson divorced in 1984. In 2019 he married the actor Ayda Kay after they had been together for more than 20 years, and she survives him.