He also collected a silver Logie for his role as Sergeant Eric O’Reilly in Cop Shop, a statue that held pride of place in the couple’s Ripponlea home alongside the small silver cup he won as best ruckman in the junior Catholic football league as a teenager.

“His childhood was very tough,” Blake remembers. Growing up as the son of a boilermaker in working-class Richmond, he thought football could be a way out, until he caught the acting bug.

Norris trained at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne’s CBD, before heading to England to try his luck at age 21. His first TV role came in the short-lived series The Eggheads, a drama about three friends sharing a flat in London.

Much of his early screen work was in filmed plays, but it was the Crawford production Homicide that gave him his first real taste of the recurring work and pay cheque that comes from a long-running series – even if it meant cropping up as half a dozen or more different characters over the years.

Bellbird, though, was a different proposition. Between 1969 and 1977 he appeared as Joe Turner in more than 1100 episodes. Cop Shop followed, with his Sarge a mainstay of more than 500 episodes between 1977 and 1984.

By the time his run in the show had ended, Norris had been elected as the state member for Noble Park. A long-time political activist who had campaigned against nuclear weapons in the 1960s and sung as part of the choir on Gough Whitlam’s It’s Time ad in 1972, he was a member of Labor’s Socialist Left faction.

According to former Premier Steve Bracks, Norris was “a moderate SL” member. “He had a total commitment to social justice and equality, from before his time in parliament,” says Bracks. “He was one of the first celebrity politicians, but he was a very good political performer, a great debater, with great passion in how he presented.”

Bracks recalls Norris as both an “effective member of parliament” and a generous friend.

“When I first stood for parliament in the seat of Ballarat North in 1985 he came up and campaigned for me,” he recalls. Bellbird and Cop Shop were still on TV, and walking through supermarkets the pair would be mobbed.

“He had great charisma, ordinary people were drawn to him, they just loved him. One of the great pleasures I had was walking around and seeing the engagement people had with him. He was a good representative.”

The rapport was mutual. After first meeting Bracks, Norris told his wife, “I think this young man has the potential to be a future leader of the party”. By 1999, he was.

When Labor was tossed out of power at the 1992 election, Norris lost his seat too. He went back to acting, and the work – a fair bit of it in son-in-law Robert Connolly’s movies – was plentiful.

His final role was in the TV series Jack Irish, where he played one of the three old rusted-on Fitzroy Football Club supporters – alongside Ronald Falk, who died in 2016, and John Flaus – in the pub where Jack (Guy Pearce) hangs out.

“Terry was one of the great gentleman of our profession and a prodigious talent to boot,” says Andrew Knight, who adapted the Peter Temple books for the screen. “He brought warmth and understanding to every role he tackled and a staggering old-world professionalism devoid of ego.

“He and Julia were tireless supporters of the arts, always engaged and forever spotted at big and small theatre productions. From Bellbird to Jack Irish, what a life and what a contribution.”

Norris had been in palliative care for a few weeks, and died after a short illness. He was 92, and is survived by Blake, his three children, Dominic, Jane, and Sarah, and four grandchildren.