Terzani eventually earned the Chinese government’s opprobrium and was expelled in 1984 for counter- revolutionary activities.But China was not, as he had fondly imagined at Columbia while cramming his head with Chinese characters, to be his Shangri-la. His readiness to immerse himself in Asian societies was matched by a refusal to put himself in hock to his own.China, where he attained his goal of Peking correspondent, was the same story, his initial Maoist enthusiasm slowly supplanted by disillusionment. But he and his family lived the experience, as pioneering Westerners in post-Cultural Revolution China, to the full: he and Angela put their young children, Folco and Saskia, through a local Chinese-only school, and for excursions they would put their bicycles on a train, travel to a far-flung destination then pedal off into the sunset. On the left politically, he was not at heart a political animal, and was regarded with wariness and mistrust by leftist circles in Italy. Two best-selling books emerged from the experience, a “Vietnam diary”, Pelle di leopardo (“Skin of the Leopard”, 1973), and Giai Phong! (1976), about the liberation of Saigon.The sympathy he showed for the Vietcong was perhaps too great and too na?ly extended, as Terzani himself later acknowledged. To do this he learned their languages, adopted their dress, prowled about alone in the places where they lived, and spent quantities of time soaking up the atmosphere – not for the sake of obtaining scoops, though these came his way, too, but to report truthfully.In Vietnam, for example, covering the last years of the war, he declined to flee as the Vietcong closed in on Saigon, but stayed for months, unable to break cover and write a line but observing the revolution at first hand and with great sympathy. He was hugely fortunate in finding an employer who gave him as much rope as he wanted – and from the beginning he took every inch.The challenge of reporting from Asia he saw as being that of melting into the crowd, shedding the skin of the privileged Western reporter with his air-conditioning and taxis and cocktails and seeing the world through the eyes of the people he was writing about.

Successively correspondent in Vietnam, Peking, Tokyo, Bangkok and New Delhi, he gave a lifetime of reporting to the Hamburg magazine, eventually becoming one of its directors. Yet no one could ever have mistaken Terzani for a company man. And he did it Terzani fashion, with great single-mindedness and certainty and resolution.Setting his sights on the post of correspondent in Peking, he studied Chinese at Columbia University in New York from 1967 to 1969. Overlooked by the parochial journalistic world of Italy, he tramped the editorial offices of Europe’s top newspapers, and at the German news weekly Der Spiegel he was successful: won over by his grand manner and resounding self-belief and perhaps encouraged in their decision by the cultural and linguistic background of his wife, Angela Staude, the Florence-born daughter of an Austrian painter, they made him Asia correspondent in 1971.Terzani repaid their trust many times.

Tiziano Terzani wrote a huge body of journalism and a shelf of books, several of them best-sellers in Britain and elsewhere as well as in Italy, where for 30 years he was famous as a foreign correspondent, writing passionately about events in Asia. But his masterpiece was himself.A tall and dignified Florentine whose distinguished bearing belied his humble background, he suddenly decided to become a journalist after taking a degree in law and pursuing a successful career with Olivetti. Tiziano Terzani, journalist and writer: born Florence 14 September 1938; married 1959 Angela Staude (one son, one daughter); died Orsigna, Italy 28 July 2004. The world will cheer you one day and dismiss you the next, so treat fanfare and failure as twins.Tom Vallance. It was a role close to his heart, for Roche himself enjoyed inventing and building things at the Los Angeles home he shared with his second wife, a former actress. He was the father of nine children and happy that three of his sons followed him into the entertainment industry – Eamonn and Brogan are actors, while Sean is an Emmy award- winning writer and producer.When asked what advice he would give an aspiring actor, Roche replied, Persevere, and never let anything or anyone deter you from your passion.

TV movies featuring Roche include Liz: the Elizabeth Taylor story (1995), in which he played the film director George Stevens.In a 1979 television version of Kaufman and Hart’s hit screwball comedy You Can’t Take It With You he had fun playing a would-be inventor who plays with explosives and Roman candles in the cellar while trying to make a new type of rocket. He was a lovable landlord in Webster (1984-86), played the grumpy private detective Luther Gillis in Magnum, P.I. (1987-89), and in Perfect Strangers (1987-88) he was a Chicago newspaper editor. Hawn and Chevy Chase as a detective eventually unravel a plot to kill the Pope, hatched by a screwball group (including Roche as a daffy archbishop, Rachel Roberts, Marc Lawrence and Billy Barty) who plan the assassination to highlight their campaign to end the exclusion of religious properties from taxation. More recently, Roche was featured in When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), Executive Decision (1996) and Woman Chaser (1999).Roche had prolific success on television, the medium which best exploited his flair for comedy He was the shifty lawyer E. Ronald Mallu in the risqu?oap opera pastiche Soap (1978-81), which broke new ground for television permissiveness (the network received 32,000 letters of protest before the show even went on the air). One of his biggest hits was Colin Higgins’s highly successful Hitchcockian comedy thriller Foul Play (1978), in which Goldie Hawn turns sleuth when a hitch-hiker whispers “Beware of the dwarf” to her before expiring.