You might say of the actor Michael Culver that, in Harold Wilson’s great phrase about Tony Benn, he immatured with age. He became more radical, more dyspeptic and more angry with politicians who get involved in foreign wars, especially those following meekly in the footsteps of the United States.
Although Culver, who has died aged 85, hailed from an upper middle-class background, and a theatrical one, too, his fire was lit by his participation in the so-called tribunal plays of the 1990s at the Tricycle (now the Kiln) in Kilburn, north London, where he was prominent in three riveting dramatic transcripts edited by Richard Norton-Taylor and directed by Nicolas Kent.
These were Half the Picture (1994), a brilliantly condensed recreation of the Scott inquiry into the sale of arms to Iraq; Nuremberg, in which he played a rambling but ultimately sympathetic Albert Speer, who acknowledged his culpability for war crimes and received a sentence of just 20 years’ imprisonment; and The Colour of Justice (both 1996), about the murder of Stephen Lawrence, over which he presided as the humane Sir William Macpherson – “as if to the manner born”, said one critic – asking for 60 seconds of silence at the end for which the cast, the critics and the audience, unbidden, stood.
During the Iraq war, Culver became a fervent supporter of the anti-war protester Brian Haw, who camped out in Parliament Square for 10 years in protest at Britain’s part in the conflict. “A deeply impressive human being,” said Culver of Haw, who died in 2011.
Last year, Culver joined his fellow actor Mark Rylance in successfully campaigning for a statue of Haw – designed by Culver’s second wife, Amanda Ward – to be placed outside the Imperial War Museum in south London.
His first real recognition as an actor, he said, came in 1977, playing Donald Maclean in a documentary drama about the Cambridge spies scripted by Ian Curteis, with Derek Jacobi as Guy Burgess and Anthony Bate as Kim Philby. In the same year, he made perhaps an even bigger impact as Major Erwin Brandt in the first of three series (he appeared in two) of Secret Army, a drama set in a fictional resistance in occupied Belgium aiming to return allied airmen shot down by the Luftwaffe to the UK (this set-up was later parodied in the hit comedy series ’Allo ’Allo). This new prominence led to the role – albeit a small, if memorable, one – of Captain Needa in the second Star Wars movie (and fifth in the chronology), The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
He graced another notable film, David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984), playing a bigoted police inspector, Major McBryde, in a cast headed by Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Davis, James Fox and Alec Guinness.
The Colour of Justice became a television movie, earning him one more credit in a television career that had begun in 1961 with an appearance in Maigret, starring Rupert Davies and Ewen Solon, and continued through to the afternoon soap Doctors in 2013.
In between, there was a wonderfully sneery Squire Armstrong – he resembled an even cleaner-cut version of Patrick McGoohan with a touch of Christopher Plummer – in The Adventures of Black Beauty (1972-74), and 13 episodes of Cadfael (1994-98), starring Derek Jacobi, as Prior Robert.
Born in Hampstead, north London, Michael was the first son of the distinguished West End actor Roland Culver and his wife, Daphne Rye, a casting director who discovered – for Binkie Beaumont, the leading West End producer of the day – Richard Burton and Stanley Baker, and who opened the still popular Daphne’s restaurant in Chelsea in 1964. He was educated at Gresham’s school in Norfolk (which he hated) and trained at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
In 1959 he joined the Dundee Rep, then under the artistic directorship of Anthony Page, where the company included Glenda Jackson and Nicol Williamson, and appeared in 35 plays over two years in a repertoire of Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, JB Priestley and Noël Coward. He then joined the Old Vic under Michael Benthall and played the Duke of Bedford in Henry VI, making his Broadway debut when the production crossed over to New York.
His West End debut followed in 1962 when he appeared in the biblical story of Judith (and Holofernes) by Jean Giraudoux, translated by Christopher Fry and directed by Harold Clurman, at the Haymarket, followed in 1963 by Priestley’s adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head, directed by Val May, at the Criterion. On tour in 1966 he played the outwardly charming but ingrained reprobate Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, a great role, directed by Sheila Hancock.
His extensive work in repertory included Lord Goring, the dandy philosopher (“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike”), in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, in 1979, and the polar explorer Roald Amundsen in Michael Attenborough’s fine production of Ted Tally’s Terra Nova (1982) at the Watford Palace.
After TV appearances in Casualty (1986) and Emmerdale (as Philip Wallace in 1992), he was notable in Spooks (2004) and in the first episode of Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander (2008).
Culver had a fine, sometimes fruity, baritone voice and was a familiar on BBC radio drama in many productions, among them voicing Rachmaninov in Melvyn Bragg’s portrait of the Russian composer (which also featured the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy and soprano Joan Rodgers) and in Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1997), in one of those classic BBC radio casts that included Anton Lesser, Eleanor Bron, Stratford Johns and Ned Sherrin.
A keen golfer, and a stalwart and accomplished member of The Stage Golfing society, Culver was twice married: to the actor Lucinda Curtis in 1962, divorced in 1986; and to Ward, a sculptor, in 2004.
Ward survives him, as do two sons from his first marriage, Roderic and Justin, a daughter, Susan, from an earlier relationship, and four grandchildren, Cameron, Isabella, Grace and Sabina.
• Michael John Edward Culver, actor and campaigner, born 16 June 1938; died 27 February 2024
