It was Dicky (Walter) Hudd, an actor and light comedian, who introduced Copley to the Communist Party, which Hudd was a keen member of in the period just before the Second World War. They both lived in Hampstead and were good friends and Copley was himself a fully supportive member of the Party during all of the 40s and much of the early 1950s.

From the autumn of 1944 to August 1945 Copley ran a theatre at Worthing on the south coast. In the run up to the 1945 general election, Copley recalled the actor-comedian Sidney Taffler and himself trying to persuade Larry Olivier to vote Labour, but the actor-manager was very doubtful about all this, very uncertain. "Two or three days later, he came to see us and he said, he said `You boys, you’re wrong,’ he said, `I’ve been having a talk to the general, the British commander in Hamburg, and he’s put me right on all this. I shall vote Conservative.’

Like many left-wing actors, his career took off in the 1960s. He appeared on television hundreds of times, in everything from The Forsyte Saga to The Avengers, The Bill and One Foot in the Grave. He was in many movies, including a role as the jeweller alongside the Beatles in `Help!’ (1965), and worked with some of the great directors. He was in Roman Polanski's `Oliver Twist’, Steven Spielberg’s `Empire of the Sun’ (1987) and Basil Dearden's `Victim’ (1962). Between 1980 and 1995, he appeared in 25 theatre productions, including many Royal Shakespeare Company productions. He worked on and off until the end of his life, and Peter Copley died on October 7th 2008, aged 93.