Norman Lugard Beaton (31 October 1934 – 13 December 1994) was a Guyanese actor long resident in the United Kingdom. He became best known for his role as Desmond Ambrose in the Channel Four television comedy series Desmond's. The writer Stephen Bourne has called him "the most influential and highly regarded black British actor of his time". Early life Beaton was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). He attended Queen's College, and went on to a teacher training college, where he received high marks, and served as the deputy headmaster at Cane Grove Anglican School in Demerara. Beaton taught and played with the calypso band The Four Bees before leaving Guyana for London in 1960. There, he attended London University, and taught briefly in Liverpool as the first black teacher in the Liverpool Education Authority before giving up on teaching to take on the acting profession. Early career Beaton developed a parallel career as a calypso singer, scoring a number-one hit in Trinidad and Tobago with "Come Back Melvina" in 1959. He then obtained a post in the shipping department of a bookshop until his wife and children arrived in London in 1960. He then became a teacher in Liverpool, becoming the first black teacher to be employed by the Liverpool Education Authority. While in the city, he played guitar for Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough – who became known as the Liverpool Poets – including appearances at the Cavern Club. Beaton became increasingly unhappy with his work as a teacher and began writing plays, his first play being the musical Jack of Spades, which was about the doomed relationship between a black man and a white woman, quite controversial at that time. The moderate success of this play gave Beaton enough confidence to give up teaching and to concentrate on the theatre. He moved first to Bristol and then to Sussex where he played the leading role in a musical he had written, Sit Down, Banna, at the Connaught Theatre. This was the beginning of his acting career. Acting career In the early 1970s, Beaton began to perform in plays in London's West End. In 1970 he played the role of Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which he described in his autobiography as "the most important role of my acting career", and also played a small role in the Frankie Howerd comedy film Up the Chastity