Obituary: John Wood CBE, actor

Widely respected actor who worked with the biggest names of stage and screen

John Wood CBE, actor.

Born: 5 July, 1930, in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.

Died: 6 August, 2011, aged 81.

JOHN Wood was hailed as one of the greatest actors in British theatre and he became a familiar face in film and television, sharing the screen with stars of the calibre of Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, although he never intended to become an actor at all.

Wood was studying law at Oxford when he discovered he had a passion for Shakespeare, beginning with the Bard's ill-formed and ill-fated king Richard III. "It was the perfect part for an amateur with no experience," he said later.

Subsequently, Wood spent several years with the Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Companies. In a feature on the "Greatest Stage Actors" in The Stage publication, the critic Michael Coveney hailed Wood's Prospero as one of the best ever, outshining even Sir John Gielgud.

However, film and television took Wood to a much wider audience. As far back as 1960 he had the title role in a BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.

But it was in later years that he was in greatest demand with producers, who admired and respected his craft and the depth and precision he could bring to secondary characters. In the 1990s he played CS Lewis's sarcastic friend Riley in Shadowlands, he was the scheming Lord Chancellor in The Madness of King George, and Harrison Ford's chauffeur and father of the eponymous heroine in the romantic comedy Sabrina.

A versatile actor, with sharp, angular features, Wood could play a wide range of roles - he was a French villager in Chocolat, with Johnny Depp, and a Scottish lord in the fantasy film The Little Vampire.

He was the MP for the Hebrides in The Rocket Post, a drama recalling attempts to send mail to outlying Scottish islands by rocket. It starred Kevin McKidd and was shot on location on Taransay in 2001, but encountered endless setbacks and finally got a limited cinema release in 2006.

The son of a surveyor and a mother who was said to be of "yeoman stock", Wood was born in Harpenden in Hertfordshire in 1930, did national service with the Royal Artillery and read law at Jesus College, Oxford, where he became president of the university dramatic society.

In 1952 he played Malvolio and the teenage Maggie Smith was Viola in Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse. He said later that he really wanted to direct, but thought he had better familiarise himself with acting first.

But acting was bringing in its rewards. In the mid-1950s he was a contemporary of Richard Burton at the Old Vic theatre company.

In 1957 he played Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real, in London's West End, with Ronnie Barker as Sancho Panza. Wood and Barker also appeared at the Edinburgh Festival that year in an English Stage Company production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nekrassov.By the late 1950s Wood was working in television as well. His features seemed to lend themselves to period roles, including Thomas Cranmer in a BBC version of A Man for All Seasons, the Polish astronomer Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton and Sydney Carton in another BBC Dickens adaptation A Tale of Two Cities.

Wood's first love, however, remained the theatre. He had a particularly fruitful association with Tom Stoppard, who wrote the main part in his play Travesties specifically for Wood. In the original RSC production in 1974, Wood played Henry Carr, a consular official in Zurich in 1917, who gets to know James Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of Dadaism.

Travesties brought him a slew of awards, including the SWET award (the predecessor of the Oliviers) and a Tony, America's most prestigious theatre award, after he reprised the role on Broadway.

He spent much of the late 1970s in the United States and appeared in other Broadway productions, including Amadeus, in which he played Salieri.

His work on Broadway also aroused the interest of American film-makers.

He was in WarGames, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and Heartburn, with Nicholson and Streep, and he served as the villain, a double agent, in Jumpin' Jack Flash with Whoopi Goldberg.

Back in England he was the Duke of Northumberland in the English period drama Lady Jane, with Helena Bonham Carter, and played Michael Heseltine in the television drama Thatcher: The Final Days, in which Sylvia Syms played Thatcher.

His performance in the RSC's 1990 production of King Lear was hailed by London theatre critics as one of the best in living memory and was followed by some of his finest films, including Shadowlands, The Madness of King George and Richard III, set in an alternative fascist England, with Wood as one of Richard's predecessors Edward IV.

Highlights of his later career also include the 1992 television adaptation of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, in which he was reunited with Maggie Smith, and his performance as the poet AE Housman in Stoppard's play The Invention of Love in 1997.

In recent years he had been in poor health and little seen on stage or screen. He was made CBE in 2007. He is survived by his second wife Sylvia and four children from his first marriage