John Woodvine, who has died aged 96, was a proud Tynesider and stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a resilient and formidable actor on stage and television for more than 70 years.
Built like a barn door, but somehow lean and sculptured with it – like a presidential carving on Mount Rushmore – he exuded a quiet authority in every role he played, not least because of his rich and powerful baritone voice, immense reserves of pent-up emotion and a rare quality of absolute stillness.
There was no faffing around, though he surprised the critic Irving Wardle in a 1992 production of Macbeth when he doubled one cameo of the dignified king Duncan with a drunken Porter at hell’s gate who staged a ventriloquial routine with a kitchen mop. This was, said Wardle, the funniest Porter he had ever seen.
Woodvine played a string of senior police officers on television from 1963 onwards – in Z Cars, Softly Softly, New Scotland Yard and Juliet Bravo – having started, prophetically, in Murder Bag (1958), the first of three popular TV series (culminating in No Hiding Place) starring Raymond Francis as detective superintendent Tom Lockhart.
He appeared in John Schlesinger’s film Darling (1965), followed by Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), Richard Attenborough’s Young Winston (1972), starring Simon Ward and, most notoriously, John Landis’s cult horror classic An American Werewolf in London (1981), in which he played the investigating doctor.
At the RSC he was in three famous productions: in 1976 as Banquo in the whispered, chamber Macbeth directed by Trevor Nunn with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench; as an unusually funny, verbosely tangled, turbaned and deferentially undercooked Sikh Dogberry in John Barton’s unsurpassed Indian colonial Much Ado About Nothing, with Dench and Donald Sinden, also in 1976; and, in 1980, as the rich but miserly ne’er-do-good Ralph Nickleby in Nunn’s and John Caird’s all-conquering Dickens adaptation (by David Edgar) of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
The longevity and variety of his career was staggering, even more so when you consider its unlikely origins. He was born in the Tyne Dock area of South Shields, third son to John Woodvine, a ship’s stoker on cruise liners, and his wife Ruth (nee Kelly).
When John Sr found a new job at the coal-fired Barking power station in east London, the family travelled by one of the coal-bearing cargo boats to Barking riverside, settling in nearby Becontree. John Jr was five at the time. When war broke out a few years later, he was evacuated to Thame, in Oxfordshire, where he was educated at Lord Williams’s grammar school.
In 1946, back in Becontree, he took a laboratory job as a cement tester at King’s Cross railway station before doing his national service in the RAF, training as a wireless operator. All the while, he was nursing an ambition to act, joining the Renegades amateur company in Ilford, where he appeared as Claudius in a 1948 production of Hamlet praised by Alan Dent in the News Chronicle for its zest and audibility.
He was by now working for a wool merchant but received a grant from the Essex county council to train at Rada. He graduated in 1953 and immediately joined the Old Vic where, between 1954 and 1959, he progressed from walk-on parts to such key roles as Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, Roderigo in Othello and Mowbray in Richard II.
This was followed by several seasons in the early 1960s at Bernard Miles’s Mermaid theatre, where he gathered a head of steam as Long John Silver (often played by Miles himself), Pentheus in The Bacchae, the title role in Macbeth and Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus.
Throughout his early life Woodvine often returned to see friends and family in South Shields and he re-connected with them onstage – and indulged his superb singing voice – in Alan Plater’s Close the Coalhouse Door (1968), a celebration of, and lament for, the mining community in the north-east, with songs by Alex Glasgow, at the Newcastle Playhouse and the Fortune in London.
Glasgow then wrote a solo musical show, Joe Lives! (1971), for Woodvine about the Tyneside bard Joe Wilson.
Woodvine had matured like a venerable oak with all this experience, and took off, professionally speaking, by playing Sir Francis Drake in the Glenda Jackson TV series Elizabeth R (1971) and, more significantly, joining McKellen and Edward Petherbridge’s touring Actors’ Company, where he played important roles in Congreve, Chekhov and King Lear.
This led to the RSC affiliation and, later, the English Shakespeare Company, founded in 1986 by director Michael Bogdanov and actor Michael Pennington. The ESC toured both here and abroad, setting out their stall with a refreshingly boisterous account of the great Henry IV (both parts) and Henry V trilogy in 1987.
In this, Woodvine played one of the finest ever Falstaffs as an imperious squire, beautifully articulated with a refined nasal drawl and the nippy lightness often exhibited by extremely fat fellows. Pennington’s Hal made it clear from the outset that this Falstaff had no part in his future kingship, which made Woodvine’s misreading of his relationship all the more poignant at his rejection.
He scored a success when doubling, in 1991, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice with the title role in Ben Jonson’s Volpone for the ESC, both great plays with money-hoarding misers attracting the intervention of justice in their mercantile dealings.
Less regularly seen at the National Theatre than with the RSC, Woodvine nonetheless appeared in some notable productions on the South Bank: as the chief of the Jewish police during the last days of the Vilna ghetto in Joshua Sobol’s brilliant Ghetto, directed by Nicholas Hytner in 1989; as Fiona Shaw’s uncomprehending husband in Sophie Treadwell’s electrifying Machinal, directed by Stephen Daldry in 1993; and as Aslaksen, the insidiously moderate printer in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, directed by Nunn and starring McKellen, in 1997.
In 2012, while appearing as the Starkeeper in Opera North’s revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel at the Grand theatre, Leeds, he collapsed on stage with a heart attack and was instantly attended in the wings by the head of resuscitation at Harrogate hospital, who happened to be in the audience. He recovered and, five months later, was back on stage when the show transferred to the Barbican in London.
Before this unwanted dramatic episode, he scored another notable double in the soaps Emmerdale and Coronation Street in 2008 and 2010 – as Joe Jacobs, a libidinous retired naval captain, in the first, and as salesman Alan Hoyle in the second.
And after it – he had a history of minor heart ailments but the constitution of an ox – he was the Archbishop of York in The Crown in 2016 and, in 2017, the master of the Oxford college who expels Evelyn Waugh’s callow Paul Pennyfeather (played by Jack Whitehall) in a delightful TV adaptation by James Wood of Decline and Fall.
Woodvine married the actor Hazel Wright in 1960 and they had two daughters, Emma, a voice coach, and Mary, an actor. They divorced in 1985.
In 1996 he married the actor Lynn Farleigh, with whom he lived in north London and Oxfordshire. She survives him, along with Emma and Mary, and four grandchildren, Bella, Rosa, Isaac and Morgan. His brothers, Michael and Albert, predeceased him.
• John Woodvine, actor, born 21 July 1929; died 6 October 2025
