Denis Quilley | Movies | The Guardian

Obituary

Denis Quilley

Gifted actor whose versatility belied his great strengths

Denis Quilley, who has died from liver cancer aged 75, maintained, without rancour, that versatility in an actor ruled out stardom.

He was certainly never a star in the populist sense, but his versatility and staying power were such that he appeared in every sort of play, from musicals to Eugene O'Neill; was directed by talents such as Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Michael Blakemore and Michel St Denis; worked with performers of the calibre of Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield; and appeared with the leading national companies - the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Regent's Park Theatre and the Chichester Festival Theatre. His last stage performance was in March, in the National's musical Anything Goes.

Tall, craggy, well-built and with a commanding voice that added voice-over television commercials to his diverse slate, Quilley was a solid player who never wanted to do anything but act. He was a slow starter, developed confidence only in his 40s, and when, at last, he first joined the National Theatre Company, he put his success down to the fact that there was a vacant slot for a man of his age and weight in the upper-middle of the company, and he just happened to fit it.

To his long-time agent Bernard Hunter, he was "the great company man of all time", affable and able to convince any director he worked with that absolutely nothing could go wrong with the whole production. By the time Olivier, then running the National, took him up, he was mature and experienced enough not to be intimidated by either the opportunity, or Olivier personally (though he revered him).

Michael Blakemore, who played a crucial part in Quilley's career, saw him playing Archie Rice in The Entertainer, at Nottingham in 1971. The character had been performed by Olivier in the original production. When Blakemore told Quilley, "You ought to be at the National," Quilley replied, "By God, I'd love that."

A few weeks later, he sat in Olivier's office with his fingers crossed, hoping that Olivier would offer him the part of Tullus Aufidius in Coriolanus, but suspecting that he might get a musical role. In fact, Olivier offered him the Coriolanus part, followed by a role in Long Day's Journey Into Night, with Olivier himself in the cast. Quilley recalled that it took a month of rehearsals before he could unwind and start acting properly.

In his five years at the National, he played in almost all the successes that set up the company for its move to its own theatre in 1976. In 1972, when he won the Plays And Players award for best supporting actor, he had been in Long Day's Journey Into Night, The School For Scandal, Macbeth and Charles MacArthur's rejuvenated classic newspaper story, The Front Page, in which he played Hildy Johnson, the one almost-human member of a Chicago newspaper reporter pack covering a murder trial and execution.

In the 1990s, he was once more a workhorse at what had become the Royal National Theatre, appearing in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Victorian comedy Money, Candide and Troilus And Cressida.

There was nothing obviously theatrical about Quilley's character or background. The son of a post- office telegraphist, he was born in Islington, north London, and brought up in Ilford, where, in 1938, he won a scholarship to board at Bancroft's, at Woodford Green, Essex. He did well enough at his lessons, but was fortunate enough to have a master named Don Francombe, who inspired him by introducing him to "Shakespeare, Mozart, civilisation and the meaning of democracy".

Apart from teaching Quilley English and Latin, Francombe ran the school arts club and choir, and directed school plays. At 17, his young charge shocked his parents by announcing that he wanted to forgo university and become an actor. Francombe was sympathetic, and asked his friends which theatre would be the best to aim at.

The answer was Sir Barry Jackson's Birmingham Rep, where Quilley made his first stage appearance in 1945. He had to break off to do his national service in Khartoum, but, after that, did a mass audition for HM Tennant, then the dominant theatre management, and became Richard Burton's understudy in Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning. Stella Chapman was understudying Claire Bloom.

Both understudies eventually played the two parts. They also later married, and Stella and their son and two daughters survive him.

For long afterwards, Quilley alternated between playing big parts in rep and smaller ones in the West End, until producer Wendy Toye asked him why he didn't get into musicals, where there was such a shortage of leading men. Quilley, who had a trained baritone voice, went into Laurie Lister's revue Airs On A Shoestring in 1953, then played his first West End role, in Wild Thyme in 1955. Grab Me A Gondola, which ran for more than 600 performances, paid, he said, for his large house overlooking Hampstead Heath. He was also in Irma La Douce, in both London and the US, and The Boys From Syracuse.

He became a hot property in an Australian police drama series which he called "Z Cars By Sydney Bridge". By the time he returned to Britain two years later, in 1969, he found that the sort of musical he was remembered for was no longer being made.

The alternative was Nottingham, whose theatre had been given national significance by John Neville. He inherited Macbeth from Barry Foster and was seen by Michael Blakemore, who made the decisive appeal to Olivier at the National.

One of the curiosities of Quilley's career was that, though a heterosexual, he played many outrageously gay parts with notable success. He always argued that heterosexuals could play gay parts better than gays could, because they were less self-conscious about it.

In 1977, the Royal Shakespeare Company asked him to play the camp female impersonator Captain Terri Dennis in Peter Nichols' Privates On Parade, the story of a 1940s Malayan jungle song-and-dance troupe. At first, he declined, but later decided that the captain was the kindest man in the piece, and played him as a vulnerable human being rather than a buffoon. The film version followed in 1982. He was also praised for his performance in 1986 of Georges in the stage version of La Cage aux Folles.

He appeared in Beckett's Waiting For Godot, Shaffer's Royal Hunt Of The Sun, Shaw's Candida, Osborne's A Patriot For Me, and won a Society of West End Theatre (Swet) award for the title role in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd in 1980.

Add to this films, including John Braine's Life At The Top and Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express, as well as television work playing Gladstone in a series, or appearing in television versions of work by TS Eliot, Arnold Bennett and Arthur Miller, and the lack of the more obvious variety of star quality pales into insignificance.

· Denis Clifford Quilley, actor, born December 26 1927; died October 5 2003

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