Paul Clark Eddington CBE (18 June 1927 – 4 November 1995) was an English actor best known for playing Jerry Leadbetter in the television sitcom The Good Life (1975–1978) and politician Jim Hacker in the sitcom Yes Minister (1980–1984) and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister (1986–1988).

Eddington was born at Paddington in London to decorative artist Albert Clark Eddington and Frances Mary (née Roberts); he was raised in St John's Wood.^[1] The family were Quakers – Albert Eddington being related to the Somerset shoemaking Clark family and the scientist Sir Arthur Eddington^[2] – and Eddington was brought up by his parents with strict family values.

His father had been "emotionally shattered" on his return from the First World War, which led to Eddington being a lifelong pacifist.^[2] Eddington attended Sibford School in Sibford Ferris, Oxfordshire. In 1952, he married Patricia Scott.

Having registered as a conscientious objector, Eddington began his acting career as a teenager with ENSA during the Second World War.^[3] He worked for Sheffield Repertory Theatre, a theatre company based at Sheffield Playhouse. In 1956, he played his first major role on television as the corrupt policeman PC Tom Carr in the Dixon of Dock Green episode The Rotten Apple, ^[4] and later that year he became a regular cast member of The Adventures of Robin Hood. Initially he played minor characters, but in the fourth season (1959–60), he played Will Scarlet.

He had a leading role in "Liberty Bar", a 1960 episode of the BBC version of Maigret, playing Harry Brown,^[5] an Australian entrepreneur. He had roles in episodes of The Avengers (1963), The Prisoner (1967) and the final episode of The Champions (1969). He was a main cast member of the television series Frontier (1968). He also had a supporting role in Hammer Films' The Devil Rides Out (1968), an episode of Van der Valk in 1972, and appeared as a "straight man" (substituting for regular stooge Henry McGee) in a 1976 episode of The Benny Hill Show. He also appeared in most episodes of the ATV series Hine (1971). In this he played Astor Harris, a member of an arms dealing firm named Pendles. Eddington appeared as civil servant Strand in the last series of Special Branch (1974).

Eddington's autobiography, So Far, So Good, was published in 1995. On 30 October 1995, five days before Eddington's death, the BBC aired an edition of Face to Face in which he discussed his life, career and battle with lymphoma.^[10][11] On that show he was asked how he would like to be remembered:

A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be, 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me.

Eddington had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, known as mycosis fungoides, when he was 28. The ailment was to cause his death eventually, but in the intervening four decades, Eddington and his immediate family kept his condition private. It only became public knowledge in 1994, when Eddington responded to press speculation about his darkening skin and hair loss.^[8]

Eddington died in Southwark, London, on 4 November 1995.^[12] He and Patricia, his wife of 43 years, had three sons and a daughter.^[13]