Murray Melvin

One role, taken very young, followed him for six decades. Murray Melvin was a member of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop when he originated the part of Geoffrey in Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, and he played it again in Tony Richardson's 1961 film: the gay student who moves in with a pregnant teenager and quietly looks after her. It won him the Best Actor prize at Cannes, and it fixed his screen persona more or less permanently.

What directors wanted afterwards was the face and the voice, precise and slightly pinched, entirely convincing as a man whose authority comes from a book of rules rather than from strength. Ken Russell used him repeatedly, as Father-Canon Jean Mignon in The Devils and as Hector Berlioz in Lisztomania. Stanley Kubrick cast him as Reverend Runt in Barry Lyndon, the chaplain who watches Barry's climb up the social ladder with undisguised distaste, and it may be the single best use anyone made of him: very little dialogue, and the disapproval carrying much of the second half of the film.

The character work continued for decades wherever a fastidious functionary was needed, from Nat in Alfie through the executioner in Alice in Wonderland, the conductor Reyer in The Phantom of the Opera and Lord James Bernard in The Lost City of Z, plus a long run as the shipboard intelligence Caravaggio in Starhunter and its later revival. He also directed in the theatre and wrote two books about it. He died in 2023.