London’s Burning actor, Glen Murphy, MBE is coming to the rescue for real now that he has become a guest therapist at the PureBody Health Club in Great Dunmow.

He began weekly sessions on Wednesday, January 27, giving sports injury treatment, massages and advice at the club.

The television and film star, whose film Person in Italia (Lost in Italy) has just been released in America, says over the years he has added several strings to his bow because young actors always need other things to do while “resting”.

He says: “I have always played sport. I played football as a boy for Chelsea and Charlton Athletic youth teams and I was a semi-professional boxer as a young man and that was my route into acting. They needed someone to play a boxer and I was the read thing.

“I realised that I could earn more as an actor than as a boxer and I wasn’t going to get my head bashed about. At the time I had a young family.”

His big break in television was in the series Shine on Harvey Moon in the 1980s. Since then he has been in serials including Dr Who, The Bill and Casualty. He was in every episode of London’s Burning. He was honoured in 2007 for services to charity after he had raised £1million for various children’s charities.

Now, 57, a father of four and a grandfather of eight, Glen, who lives near Dunmow, is also a professional photographer, a second Dan black belt and has just qualified as a sports injury therapist with the Association of Holistic and Complementary Practitioners.

Sport is in his family’s blood. His father, Terence Murphy was a British boxing champion.

Glen said: “He was the first sportsman to appear on ITV when it was launched in 1955. He was in a middleweight title fight being televised and his was the first face the camera found.”

The actor has just produced and starred in a film shot near a house he has in Chieti in the Abruzzi region of Italy. It’s a crime thriller co-starring Ray Winston playing a gangster.

The two actors are life-long friends, they grew up together in London’s East End together and each is godfather to the other’s children.

Glen says: “The story is about a man who wakes up in Italy and doesn’t know why he is there. He’s been a bad man in the past and this is about redemption.”

He added: “The Americans are marketing it as a gangster film which it isn’t and they have renamed it Lords of London. There aren’t any lords in it but I went back and created some phoney lords afterwards to make sense of the title. They are saying Ray is a gangster with a gun in his hand. He doesn’t even have a gun but that’s marketing, it’s whatever sells.”

Glen Murphy will be a guest therapist at PureHealth one day a week for the next three weeks.