Whether it can be traced back to his training - not at drama school, since he never went there, but perhaps to his early days in rep, or with the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare company in its 1960s heyday - Peter Jeffrey, who has died at the age of 70, brought to his acting the ring of truth for which so many actors strive in vain.
Whether in Shakespeare or Shaw, JB Priestley or Michael Frayn, Ibsen or Charles Wood, it was neither stagey nor without impact. It seemed, whether on stage or small screen, simply suited to the medium. His work was often very funny, especially as the stereotypes which Jeffrey often found himself playing - old Etonians or newly-declared aristocrats, glib authoritarians or public- school upstarts, profound hypocrites and shallow old soldiers. To them all, he gave the kind of warmth and immediacy which enabled us to believe in them.
Playgoers may remember best Jeffrey's canary waist-coated Falstaff in the Merry Wives Of Windsor (RSC, 1985), complete with wax moustache, tweed suit and comic resource amid the Osbert Lancaster world of suburban postwar Windsor; or, in the west end in 1994, his performance as the loquacious Inquisitor in St Joan, which proved to be one of the evening's chief pleasures. It was not just the clarity and authority of the voice, but the intelligence and stage presence. He had, after all, shared stages with Peggy Ashcroft, Marius Goring, Eric Porter and Paul Schofield.
There was no hint of that theatrical technique when it came to the small screen. Among Jeffrey's early television parts were King Philip of Spain in Elizabeth R, Mr Squales in London Belongs To Me, Parolles in All's Well That End's Well, Maurice Webb in the series One By One, Oliver Cromwell in By The Sword Divided, and Michael Anstey in Chelworth. More recent work came as the corrupt police chief in Our Friends In The North, as Lt Col Harry Bernwood in the Denis Potter series Lipstick On Your Collar, and as the power broker Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch.
One of nine children, Jeffrey was born in Bristol and educated at Harrow school and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Peter Hall and other theatrically ambitious undergraduates. When Hall set up the Oxford and Cambridge Players, later known as the Elizabethan Theatre Company and subsidised by the Arts Council, young Jeffrey made his London debut as Julius Caesar (1953).
He went to Stratford with Hall's newly-formed RSC to play Lucentio in The Taming Of The Shrew, which starred Peter O'Toole and Peggy Ashcroft, Agamemnon in the Sandpit revival of Troilus And Cressida, Steward to Ashcroft's Paulina in The Winter's Tale and Delio to her Duchess of Malfi.
In 1962, Jeffrey played Banquo to Eric Porter's Macbeth, Escalus to Goring's Angelo in Measure For Measure, and the goldsmith in Clifford Williams' famous stopgap revival of A Comedy Of Errors, before the delayed opening of Peter Brook's King Lear, in which Jeffrey played Albany.
After that he toured for Prospect Productions as Mac beth, and played Malvolio, the classical hypnotic, with extraordinary irony opposite Vanessa Redgrave in Twelfth Night.
Rejoining the RSC in 1975 as a comic old soldier in Jingo, Jeffrey went on to appear with the National Theatre in Maugham's For Services Rendered and Priestley's When We Are Married, in which he played the press photographer who spills the beans on the old couples. Ever the valuable Shakespearean stalwart, he returned to the National in 1990 as Gloucester to Brian Cox's King Lear, and Clarence in Richard III.
If he was classified by colleagues as "one of life's Horatios", it was perhaps because Jeffrey, like any good actor, was a good listener, and by nature self-effacing. He was also a good company man, ever ready to advise, and sometimes console, younger players of ambition. Schoolchildren, too, found his talks highly entertaining. He himself lacked great ambition, but it does not seem to have impeded his career as a first-rate, if usually secondary, actor. In half a century of acting, he was rarely unemployed.
Among his films were Becket, The Fixer, the headmaster in If..., Ring Of Bright Water, Anne Of A Thousand Days, Oh Lucky Man, The Odessa File, Midnight Express, Britannia Hospital, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Jeffrey was married twice: firstly to Yvonne Bonnamy, by whom he had four daughters and a son; and later to Jill Jowett.
Peter Jeffrey, actor, born April 18 1929; died December 25 1999
