Malcolm Tierney, who has died aged 75 of pulmonary fibrosis, was a reliable and versatile supporting actor for 50 years, familiar to television audiences as the cigar-smoking, bullying villain Tommy McArdle in Brookside, nasty Charlie Gimbert in Lovejoy and smoothie Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe in David Nobbs's A Bit of a Do, a Yorkshire small-town comedy chronicle starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor.
Always serious and quietly spoken offstage, with glinting blue eyes and a steady, cruel gaze that served him well as authority figures on screen, Tierney was a working-class Mancunian who became a core member of the Workers' Revolutionary party in the 1970s. He never wavered in his socialist beliefs, even when the WRP imploded ("That's all in my past now," he said), and always opposed restricted entry to the actors' union, Equity.
Offstage, he looked the part, wearing broad-brimmed hats and long coats and scarves, ideal casting when he took over as the bibulous actor-laddie Selsdon Mowbray in the National Theatre's delirious revival of Michael Frayn's Noises Off in 2000 on its transfer to the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter), via the Piccadilly. Earlier in the same year he played two sober authority figures in Margaret Edson's harrowing Wit at the Vaudeville, the first play to deal with ovarian cancer.
Also on stage, he played the jazz singer George Melly, the painter LS Lowry and Jim Robinson, one of the four men wrongly convicted of murdering the newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater in 1978; that solo performance in a 1999 play, Just Not Fair, was given on a double-bill with his friend Corin Redgrave's recital of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis.
And he achieved theatrical notoriety (with the rest of the cast) at the Royal Court in 1968 as Benjamin Disraeli in William Gaskill's production of Edward Bond's Early Morning, which featured Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale as lesbian lovers and a final act in heaven where everyone ate each other. This was the last major play to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain, and was performed under club conditions in Sloane Square.
Tierney's father, Ernest, was a boilermaker and trained draughtsman from Warrington who worked at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach (where Malcolm's grandmother ran a boarding house) on the shooting ranges and darts in the summer. His mother, Agnes, nee Kennedy, worked in the cotton mills.
He attended St Mary's Roman Catholic school in Failsworth, Oldham, and studied design at the Manchester School of Art. While working as a textile designer and printmaker he became involved in amateur dramatics at the Little theatre in Bolton, which had been set up by John Wardle (father of the drama critic Irving Wardle), whose wife, Norma, became something of a mentor to Tierney.
As a result, he came south on a scholarship to the Rose Bruford drama school in Sidcup, Kent, in 1958 and landed his first acting job in 1962 at Bernard Miles's Mermaid theatre, London, a rare revival of Sean O'Casey's Red Roses for Me. He then joined Sally Miles's repertory company at the Theatre Royal, Margate, playing in Great Expectations to an audience of one – who gave the cast an enthusiastic standing ovation (it was a cold night).
He spent six months at the Mayfair in the third takeover cast of Beyond the Fringe but counted his West End debut as appearing with Trevor Howard in Strindberg's The Father at the Piccadilly in 1964. He appeared at the Young Vic in 1971 with Vanessa Redgrave and Bob Hoskins in Robert Shaw's extraordinary play Cato Street, about the 1820 conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and his entire cabinet.
Three years later he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the Aldwych in London to play Claudio in Keith Hack's production of Measure for Measure (with Francesca Annis and Michael Pennington) and Macduff in Trevor Nunn's Macbeth starring Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren.
Tierney had been acting on radio and television regularly since 1963 and moved successfully into supporting roles in numerous films, including George Lucas's Star Wars (1977), Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1993), as the public prosecutor, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995) – he was the English magistrate responsible for executing William Wallace's wife.
Back on stage he played major roles in the regions, including, in 1999, Walter in Arthur Miller's The Price at the Bristol Old Vic and the philosopher George Moore in Tom Stoppard's Jumpers at the Birmingham Rep, though the eccentric, self-defeating logician was the sort of "comic personality" role for which his trademark phlegmatic dryness and imperturbability were not quite enough.
He was better suited to Agamemnon in Hecuba, Euripides' great tragedy translated for the RSC by Tony Harrison in 2005, in which he was reunited with Redgrave; Laurence Boswell's production played at the Albery (now the Noël Coward) before touring America. Tierney's shifty, tense warlord suggested that he knew what lay in wait for him once he arrived home.
Tierney's last stage appearance was in Anya Reiss's seriously updated version of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Southwark Playhouse in 2012, when the Guardian's Lyn Gardner wrote that his languid Sorin "could have been dozing in this sunlit garden on the edge of the lake for a century or more".
He met the Austrian artist and translator Andrea Schinko when acting at the English Speaking Theatre in Vienna, where she was working in the cloakroom. They married in 1979 and separated amicably 15 years ago.
He is survived by Andrea and their two daughters, Elsa, an artist and jewellery maker, and Anna, an actor, and by two siblings, John, also an actor, and Maureen.
Michael Coveney
Vanessa Redgrave writes: I first met Malcolm in 1971. We worked with the director Peter Gill, producer Michael White, and actor and playwright Robert Shaw on Bob's play Cato Street. Malcolm played the Tory government spy and agent provocateur who was recruited by the home secretary Viscount Sidmouth to create an armed conspiracy that would justify the hugely repressive Six Acts legislated in the wake of the Peterloo massacre in 1819.
On a summer eve of 2005, as I entered the Kennedy Center in Washington DC to play Hecuba, with Malcolm playing Agamemnon, I saw his face convulsed with grief: he said that my sister-in-law Kika had just called and told him of my brother Corin's massive cardiac arrest.
I saw Malcolm last at Corin's funeral in 2010. He was a loving man, and very loved; a brilliant actor. Only my brother or sister could make me laugh the way Malcolm did. He was a steadfast, hardworking trade unionist, and unafraid. On a profound level of civic conscience, Mal was the kind of citizen everyone needs everywhere. He was one of our rare visitors from Seamus Heaney's Republic of Conscience.
• Malcolm Tierney, actor, born 25 February 1938; died 19 February 2014
