Although Timothy West, who has died aged 90, never played the greatest stage roles at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, he took on many of them – Falstaff (twice), King Lear (four times), Uncle Vanya, Willy Loman, Ibsen’s Solness – in regional reps and on tour, in a career that spanned seven decades and established him as one of the most recognisable, popular and substantial actors of his day.
On television he was a notable interpreter of leading political and institutional figures, portraying Horatio Bottomley, Edward VII, Mikhail Gorbachev, Winston Churchill and Thomas Beecham, and he completed a double in soap history in 2013 by appearing in Coronation Street and EastEnders within one year: as Eric Babbage, a short-lived fiance to Sue Johnston’s Gloria in the first, and as Stan Carter, a former Billingsgate fishmonger drawn into Albert Square life by his publican son in the second.
This range and versatility carried right through to his involvement with theatres and companies beyond the stage itself, as director, manager and board member. With his second wife, the actor Prunella Scales, whom he married in 1963, and their first son, the actor and director Samuel West, he formed a dynastic bulwark that was not grand or high-flown, but practical and participatory. He believed in the cause of regional theatre, serving on the Arts Council drama panel, and on the board of Bristol Old Vic, spent 17 years as a director and trustee of the National Student Drama festival and, from 2003 until 2018, was president of the London drama school Lamda.
West was a popular and convivial figure in his profession, and a stalwart of several important initiatives in the theatre of the last century: the touring Prospect Theatre Company that catapulted Ian McKellen to stardom in 1969 (he was Bolingbroke to McKellen’s Richard II, Mortimer to his Edward II); Charles Marowitz’s Open Space (in 1974, he played a man who eats himself to death in BS Johnson’s Down Red Lane); a tricky interim period at the Old Vic; and a fine Theatre Night series of plays on BBC TV, which included Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, John Galsworthy’s Strife and David Storey’s The Contractor.
Always solid, four-square, with a crooked grimace and a light, sarcastic touch where appropriate, West was ideal as the marquee boss in Storey’s play, as he was in the 1980s TV comedy series Brass, a send-up of all things northern, from DH Lawrence to Love on the Dole, as a ghastly old mill owner, or in JB Priestley’s When We Are Married, as the textile magnate and town councillor Albert Parker, in a superb 1986 West End revival directed by Ronald Eyre.
West was indeed a plausible gruff Yorkshireman. He was born in Bradford, while his father, the actor Lockwood West, was on tour there. But his parents – his mother was the actor Olive Carleton-Crowe – who had met, also on tour, in The Ghost Train in 1927, settled in Bristol. The family moved to South Ruislip in London after the second world war (but not before Timothy was expelled from Bristol grammar prep school), and he attended the John Lyon school in Harrow and took his A-levels at Regent Street Polytechnic (now part of the University of Westminster).
This led to work as a recording engineer and furniture salesman, a stint in the box office at Frinton rep, and a growing enthusiasm for amateur dramatics. His association with the student drama festival began with his production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
Encouraged by the critic Harold Hobson, he made his professional stage debut at Wimbledon theatre in 1956 as a farmer in Summertime; he also married an art student he had met at the polytechnic, Jacqueline Boyer (the marriage ended in divorce in 1961). After seasons in rep at Salisbury and Hull, he made his West End bow in a farce, Caught Napping, at the Piccadilly theatre in 1959.
In the 1960s, he was in and out of the RSC, a member of the BBC radio drama rep and appeared in Robert Bolt’s Gentle Jack (1963) as part of a cast led by Edith Evans and Kenneth Williams. With the RSC at the Arts theatre he was in Nil Carborundum by Henry Livings and Afore Night Come by David Rudkin and at the Aldwych in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade production in 1964. In his one Stratford-upon-Avon season, in 1965, he played minor roles in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens (with Paul Scofield, directed by John Schlesinger).
Prospect gave him the chance to expand into bigger roles – Prospero in The Tempest, Claudius to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet, a King Lear at the Edinburgh festival, Harry in Charles Dyer’s Staircase – and he returned to the RSC to play a reptilian, notably nasty Judge Brack in Trevor Nunn’s 1975 world tour of Hedda Gabler, with Glenda Jackson, Patrick Stewart and Peter Eyre.
At the same time, his TV career took off in earnest with 13 episodes of Edward the King (1975) for ATV, followed by the first of his three Sir Winstons in Churchill and the Generals (1979) and thereafter a vast array of roles, including, recently, the Dad’s Army remakes, The Lost Episodes (2019), in which he was Private Godfrey, and Gentleman Jack (2019-20), as Jeremy, father of Anne Lister (Suranne Jones). In films, he was the royal physician Dr Botkin in Franklin J Schaffner’s Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and the police commissioner in Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal (1973) with Edward Fox.
A yen for practical involvement beyond acting resulted in one season as artistic director of the Forum theatre, Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees, in 1973; a post of co-director with Prospect in 1975, continuing as Toby Robertson’s company moved into the Old Vic (when the National Theatre migrated to the South Bank) in 1977; and then a short, highly controversial period as artistic director at the Old Vic in 1980-81 when the Arts Council only offered support to “Prospect at the Old Vic” if Robertson was removed (which he was, summarily), and West disowned a packed-out but critically derided production of Macbeth starring Peter O’Toole.
West consoled himself by playing Beecham in Ned Sherrin and Caryl Brahms’s rewarding solo play at the Apollo. The Arts Council cut the Prospect grant completely in 1981, leaving him distraught and guilt-ridden. Ironically, he returned to the theatre soon after, when the Canadian impresario Ed Mirvish rode to the rescue.
He played Stalin in David Pownall’s fine play, Master Class, and, in 1984, Charlie Mucklebrass, a noisy Huddersfield thespian in Mel Smith’s production of Bamber Gascoigne’s Big in Brazil, a misfired Feydeau-esque farce stranded up the Amazon (without a paddle).
Prunella Scales was also in Big in Brazil. Unlike such inseparable theatrical couples as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne or Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, they were not often in shows together, but they made an exception for When We Are Married and a 1991 Bristol Old Vic/National Theatre joint production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, directed by Howard Davies, which West acknowledged was not a total success. They were also in a fine revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party (West as Goldberg, Scales as Meg, the genteel landlady) at the Piccadilly in 1999.
He teamed up as Falstaff with Samuel as Prince Hal in an English Touring Theatre production of Henry IV, Parts One and Two in 1997, and the pair played a major revival of Caryl Churchill’s brilliant riddle of fathers and cloned sons, A Number, first at the Sheffield Crucible in 2006 and again, four years later, at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. Another Lear for English Touring Theatre at the Old Vic in 2003 was fresh and surprising but not a tornado, exactly, and he returned to the RSC as a striking Menenius in Coriolanus in 2007.
His few other films included Michael Apted’s Agatha (1979) with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987) with Kevin Kline, Denzel Washington and Penelope Wilton, and Richard Eyre’s Iris (2001) with Judi Dench.
In his memoir, A Moment Towards the End of the Play (2001), West gives a vivid picture of an actor’s life on the road, during the last days of weekly rep, and he also published a collection of his letters to Pru, I’m Here, I Think, Where Are You? (2004), written when away on tour; she had saved them all.
He loved old railways and, especially, the inland waterways of Britain, and he and Pru made a TV programme, Great Canal Journeys, in 2014 in which they celebrated this enthusiasm and discussed Pru’s “slight condition of a sort of Alzheimer’s”. This gentle programme, in which they appeared until 2019, encapsulated 50 years of a working marriage.
West was appointed CBE in 1984 and was a member, typically, of both the Garrick and the Groucho clubs.
He is survived by Prunella and their sons, Samuel and Joseph, and by a daughter, Juliet, from his first marriage, as well as seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
• Timothy Lancaster West, actor and director, born 20 October 1934; died 12 November 2024
