Although he never became a major star, Colvin took supporting roles in films alongside big names such as Peter Ustinov (Viva Max!, 1969), Robert Redford (Jeremiah Johnson, 1972), Paul Newman (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972), Burt Lancaster (Scorpio, 1973), Charles Bronson (The Stone Killer, 1973), John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn (Rooster Cogburn, 1975), and Rock Hudson (Embryo, 1976).He was also seen in many television programmes, including Tarzan (1968), Kojak (1974), The Six Million Dollar Man (1975-77), The Rockford Files (1976), Cagney & Lacey (1986) and Murder, She Wrote (1987, 1991). Banner usually stayed just one step ahead while looking for an antidote to free him from his other self. Ironically, though, McGee was saved from a plane crash and a forest fire by the Hulk.The Marvel comic story, created by Stan Lee, was turned into two live-action television films, The Incredible Hulk and The Return of the Incredible Hulk, in 1977, with Colvin as the relentless reporter, a role he continued through five series (1978-82) and another one-off adventure, The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988). However, the actor originally had doubts about playing McGee, saying:When they told me the title, I laughed.

But then they gave me two scripts to read and I knew the series would go. (The Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation also required a switch of actor, from Bill Bixby to Lou Ferrigno -a former Mr Universe – as Banner involuntarily burst out of his famous splitting shirt to terrorise wrongdoers with his alter ego.)McGee went on his trail after witnessing a bizarre murder, believing the creature was responsible and suspecting the scientist’s secret – while everyone else believed him to be dead. The character actor Jack Colvin stepped out of roles as detectives, doctors, pimps and thieves to get his longest screen run as the sharp-eyed, hard-nosed tabloid newspaper reporter Jack McGee on television in The Incredible Hulk.
The headline-hunting National Register journalist tried to track down the mild-mannered, compassonate scientist Dr David Banner, who went on the run after accidentally injecting himself with an overdose of gamma rays during an experiment to test human strength, causing him to turn into the green-skinned, raging man-beast the Hulk during moments of stress. Jack Colvin, actor: born Lyndon, Kansas 13 October 1934; died Los Angeles 1 December 2005. With Katrin Hansing, a South African anthropologist, who contacted me after I wrote about Guevara in Africa for BBC Online, Ilanga began looking into ways of returning home – the principal one being to make a film of the journey, which the two hoped would finance the fares and Ilanga’s resettlement.

This was where I came in, as a bit-part player; I was hoping to tag along with them to do some reports for the BBC.Hansing still intends to complete the film one day, if only to show Freddy Ilanga’s family how one of their own went from being a newspaper vendor to a brain surgeon – via contact with one of the great icons of the 20th century.Mark Doyle. She entered his name into a search engine and was astonished to see it come back on a published article signed by Ilanga and marked Havana, Cuba.Tentative approaches were made, with neither side quite believing at first that the contact was genuine. He qualified as a doctor and specialised in paediatric neurosurgery He married a Cuban woman and had two children. Over the years he lost almost all contact with his family members in Africa, most of whom assumed he had been killed as a young guerrilla in the 1960s.All that changed in September 2003 when one of Ilanga’s sisters-in-law, who had never given up on him, saved up to pay for a short session in an internet caf?n the city of Bukavu, near Freddy’s birthplace. Freddy Ilanga spoke by phone to his mother, Mwausi Museke, for the first time in almost 40 years. “Che? In Africa? Really?” He tossed me a paperback version of Guevara’s diary, A Dream of Africa (2000).

I got lost in the text, and started plotting in my mind how to place the idea of some features to my editors at the BBC Various Congolese who fought with Guevara were still alive. On that day, two years ago, Freddy Ilanga was one.After he worked as Guevara’s translator, Ilanga’s life changed dramatically again. He was told to go to Havana shortly after the departing Cuban military force had left Congo in November 1965. The official reason was that Guevara wanted him to have a decent education. But, given the tense Cold War atmosphere, the Cubans probably also had security concerns about a man who had been so close to Guevara.When Ilanga first arrived in the Caribbean he was homesick for Congo, but, after realising he would probably never get enough money together to return, he buckled down to life in Havana. I was compiling a series of radio reports for the BBC on the Congolese war, and my friend absent-mindedly referred to Che Guevara’s time in the region.

But he gradually grew to admire the hard-working Cuban, who, according to Ilanga, showed the same respect to black people as he did to whites. In those days, in Congo, this was truly revolutionary.I first learnt about Freddy Ilanga while staying with a friend on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. As a young black African who saw white settlers as an oppressive force – and who knew nothing about the revolution in Cuba – Ilanga was at first very wary; he once confided that he thought of Guevara as “that sarcastic white”. That would have pleased Guevara – and Freddy Ilanga.During the seven months they spent together, Freddy Ilanga lived and breathed Che Guevara’s life. Nelson Mandela is on record as saying Cuban support – notably for the anti-apartheid regime in Angola in the 1980s – was critical to the ending of white rule in South Africa.