The deals which should double the group's bed population to more than 800 will be financed by a placing and

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The deals, which should double the group's bed population to more than 800, will be financed by a placing and open offer Other acquisitions are expected. Headed by William Fitch, Tamaris acquired four Ulster properties in January. It increased interim profits from pounds 2,000 to pounds 118,000 The shares rose 0.25p to 2.25p.. Robert Flemyng, with his handsome, original looks, noble expression and warm, commanding voice, had many of the attributes of the old-fashioned matinee idol and his devoted following during his post-war heyday testified to that aspect of his long and distinguished career. It was a career not only notable for his work as an actor but also for his dedication to professional good causes. He made his first stage appearance at the age of 19 in 1931 in Truro as Keith Raglan in Patrick Hamilton's thriller Rope, but his first big success came five years later when at the age of 24 he created the role of the dashing Kit Neilan in Terence Rattigan's French Without Tears, that shimmeringly light and beguiling comedy.

It was a character to which he brought an immediate and distinctive charm in a play which was the perfect vehicle for bringing him to early prominence. After this he consolidated his reputation as a leading actor and remained so for 60 years. When he returned to the London stage after the Second World War, in which he had acquitted himself with notable bravery and distinction, he made another success as the decent, progressive schoolmaster in Warren Chetham Strode's long-running problem play The Guinea Pig, about the trials encountered by a working-class boy after being given a place in a conventional public school.Throughout his career Flemyng was cast in plays which were very much of their period and of a kind, perhaps, which reflected the somewhat bland middle-class values of contemporary audiences; his incursions into classical theatre were comparatively rare. Perhaps this was inevitable, for it was hard for directors and producers not to realise how sympathetically he fitted that role of the decent, average middle-class Englishman from the world of Brief Encounter, a role to which he also brought an infallible attractiveness and likeability.But he revealed a new, unsuspected, strength when he appeared with Alec Guinness as Edward Chamberlayne, the distraught husband, in T.S. Eliot's poetic drawing-room drama The Cocktail Party Party, in 1949.

He seemed to have acquired a remarkable ability to convey the inner anguish of a troubled man of honour forced to face the consequences of his own emotional failings. His fine and sensitive playing of this part left an indelible impression that it could not have been better realised. This new vein of agonised soul-searching stood him in good stead and led to other roles of similar resonance notably as James Callifer in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed, which he played in New York in 1957. In London, in 1954, he had appeared as the enigmatic general Rupert Forster, on trial for cowardice in John Whiting's Marching Song. In Charles Duff's recent study of pre- Osborne London theatre there is a typically self-effacing note from Flemyng himself speaking with acuteness about his playing of this problematic role.Flemyng was the son of a Liverpool doctor and was educated at Haileybury.