Berlin  - Horst Tappert, the actor who played a stubborn police detective in the long-running German television series Derrick, has died at the age of 85.

His wife, Ursula, said Tappert, who had lived in seclusion in recent years, died in a Munich hospital on Saturday. He had been well until a few days earlier. She declined to describe his illness.

Tappert's jowly, thick-lipped face personified senior inspector Stephan Derrick, the compassionate cop who seemed to have seen every facet of evil in his long career.

Stubbornly, Derrick solved murder after murder, helped by his deputy Harry Klein, who was played by Fritz Wepper.

One of Germany's most successful television exports ever, the crime series has reputedly been aired in more than 100 nations and remained in production from 1974 until
1998.

It had a strong fan following in Italy and other European nations, making Tappert one of the most recognizable German faces in places as far away as Japan.

The 281 episodes were written by the series creator, Herbert Reinecker, who died last year. The stories often involved lifelong guilt, with Derrick using his moral integrity to coax out the truth from suspects.

Wearing tinted spectacles to protect his eyes, Tappert continued to play the role of the deep-thinking policeman at an age when most real-life detectives had long ago retired.

Derrick waited 24 years for a promotion. Near the end of the series the elderly detective was seconded to Europol, a European police office.

Tappert, born 1923 in Elberfeld in the west of Germany, began his acting career after the Second World War.

Tall and thin, he had applied for a job as a bookkeeper at a theatre, but ended up on stage instead. He later confessed in his autobiography that he preferred acting comedy to the deeply serious Derrick.

In an interview this May, Tappert said he had chosen seclusion with his wife after a life of hard work and had not kept up his friendship with the other actors from the series. He and his wife married in 1957. (dpa)