Chris Langham, the British TV actor and writer whose career was sullied by child sex abuse charges, has died. He was 77.

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Langham died of pancreatic cancer on June 24 this year, according to an obituary published by The Times on Thursday.

The actor and writer was best known for his role as cabinet minister Hugh Abbot in Armando Iannucci‘s satirical comedy The Thick of It, which ran on the BBC from 2005 to 2012 and won Langham a BAFTA TV Award for best comedy performance in May 2006.

Led by a stellar Peter Capaldi, the show documented the bumbling ineptitude of British government staffers, including ministers, advisors and communications personnel. It is still considered one of the best comedies ever produced in the U.K., and set Iannucci up to make something of a U.S. counterpart to The Thick of It in Veep.

Langham also saw success with John Morton’s People Like Us, another spoof documentary that ran on the BBC, following Langham as the fictional journalist Roy Mallard. Some of his other credits include Not the Nine O’Clock News written by Richard Curtis and co-starring Rowan Atkinson, as well as Help with Paul Whitehouse, Kiss Me Kate alongside Caroline Quentin, Amanda Holden and Darren Boyd, and Chelmsford 123.

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But Langham’s reputation soured in late 2006 when he was charged with 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children. It began the previous year, when he was arrested by Kent Police in connection with Operation Ore, a British police operation investigating credit-card customers paying to access abusive images of children online.

Part of his defence at trial was that he was researching a peeping tom character called “Pedro” for a television comedy, which Help co-writer Whitehouse corroborated. Whitehouse also said the character was not intended to be a paedophile, nor was he aware of Langham obtaining that material. During the trial, Langham was also accused of having sex with an underage girl — who said she was 14 at the time — in hotels, his West End dressing room, his car and his home. Langham denied these charges and was found not guilty of six counts of indecent assault.

The following year, in 2007, he was convicted on charges of downloading child sex abuse images and videos, including what a British judge described as a “graphic […] sadistic brutalisation” of a child, and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. He was placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years, and released in November 2007 after his sentence was reduced to six months. “My life has been ruined, but my conscience is clear,” he said after leaving prison, still maintaining he had “no sexual interest in children.”

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