John Savident: Star of stage and screen best known for time on the cobbles
Actor John Savident appeared on screen in cinema classics and Hollywood blockbusters, but was best known to audiences as Weatherfield butcher Fred Elliott.
Born in Guernsey in 1938 to a local fisherman father and a Swiss mother, Savident and his family left the Channel Islands, then under German occupation, and moved to Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, when he was three.
He started his career as a policeman in Manchester and during his six years on the beat was stabbed in the arm
