Warner, an established classical actor, was not alone in feeling miscast as a song-and-dance man. But, like the rest of the company, he had charm and youth on his side. When a West End manager shunted the refreshingly innocent show into the Vaudeville Theatre, Warner, the recent Osric and Reynaldo (he often played two parts in Shakespeare) to Alec Guinness's bearded Hamlet in St Martin's Lane, found himself warbling instead. Some critics found it intolerably amateur, but the production ran for 2,283 performances, establishing, with Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend, a new cult of small-scale, English musicals to set against postwar Broadway.
Otherwise, except for dancing with Moira Shearer in Walter Hasenclever's A Man Of Distinction, just after Salad Days (Prince's, now the Shaftesbury, 1957), and a stint, some 25 years later, in the National Theatre's Guys And Dolls, Warner stuck to his classical last.
He had acted, for Peter Brook at Stratford-on-Avon, in Romeo And Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost in 1947, and, in the 1950s, spent some years at Bristol Old Vic, when it habitually transferred revivals to the Old Vic - as, for example, Paris to Claire Bloom's Juliet.
Among Warner's later stage credits were Canon Fulbert, in Ronald Millar's Abelard And Heloise (Wyndham's, 1970), the Royal Shakespeare Company's Becket, and The Taming Of The Shrew (both 1961), Shaw's Widowers' Houses (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1965) and Christopher Fry's version of Anouilh's Ring Round The Moon (Haymarket, 1968). In AA Milne's Toad Of Toad Hall, Warner played Rattie four times, and he was a regular at the Chichester festival from 1978.
A clergyman's son, born in George, in the Western Cape province of South Africa, Warner was educated at Brighton College after his family returned to England. His first job, in 1939 was at the Little Theatre, Bristol. After wartime naval service, which included Russian convoys, he returned to acting.
His first television appearance was in 1946; later credits included She Stoops To Conquer, Mr Bean, Lovejoy, Poirot, Doctor In The House, and King George V, in The Treaty. His film credits included The Cruel Sea (1953), Isadora (1968), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) and Got It Made (1974).
A popular figure, the boyish charm he displayed in Salad Days was also characteristic of him in private life. He never married.
John Warner, actor, born January 1 1924; died May 19 2001
