Obituaries: John Stahl, Take the High Road and Game of Thrones star

John Stahl, actor. Born: 23 June 1953 in Sauchie, Clackmannanshire. Died: 2 March 2022 in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, aged 68

John Stahl 'seemed to embody something of Scotland in his very presence'

John Stahl, who has died aged 68 after being diagnosed with cancer last year, was a much loved and deeply admired Scottish actor, whose towering presence has for decades seemed like a permanent feature of Scottish drama on stage and screen. Perhaps best known as Tom “Inverdarroch” Kerr in the STV drama series Take The High Road, which ran from 1980 until 2003, Stahl also appeared in television series as varied as Taggart, Holby City, Midsomer Murders and Game Of Thrones, in which he played Lord Rickard Karstark; and his stage career took him from Cumbernauld Theatre in the 1970’s across the whole range of Scottish theatres, from the Tron and the Traverse to Dundee Rep and the Lyceum, and south to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Court.

John Stahl’s last stage appearance in Scotland was in a 2019 touring production of the Rebus murder mystery Long Shadows, in which he played the terrifying gangland boss Cafferty, wielding “Putinesque” power from a penthouse flat overlooking the Meadows; and in 2014, he played Murdac Stewart, Regent of Scotland, in Rona Munro’s huge historical trilogy the James Plays, co-produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the National Theatre in London. John Stahl’s burly 6’2” stature and strong presence meant that he was often cast in “heavy” roles, as a king, baron, policeman or patriarch; but he also had a wonderful subtlety of facial expression, often expressed through a gleaming or twinkling eye, that added a whole dimension of humanity and vulnerability to his performances, and that led – among other outstanding work – to his 1997 Stage Award for the best male performance on the Edinburgh Fringe, in Mike Cullen’s controversial play Anna Weiss.

John Stahl was born John Macdonald Steele in Sauchie, Clackmannanshire, where his father Alec worked at the local distillery, and his mother Nan was a shop assistant before her marriage. John had one brother, Eddie. He first fell in love with theatre at secondary school in Alloa Academy, where his drama teacher introduced him to Shakespeare, and encouraged what soon became a lifelong love-affair with the power and poetry of Shakespearean drama. After school, he won a place at the RSAMD in Glasgow, where he was a contemporary of Maureen Beattie, and of his future partner Jane Paton. When he graduated in 1975, he moved on quickly to acting and directing work in Cumbernauld and Darlington.

In 1979 he won a Scotsman Fringe First Award in Edinburgh for his production of Paul Pender’s play The Game, inspired by the Scottish football team’s legendary 1978 failure in Argentina; and by that time, he had also taken up the first of many television roles, playing PC Scoular in the STV soap opera Garnock Way. In the 1980s, alongside his Take The High Road commitments, he struck up a close working relationship with Michael Boyd, then artistic director of the Tron Theatre, and later of the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in the 1982 production of Macbeth that opened the Tron Theatre’s main space for the first time. John was married for some years to NHS dental specialist Dr Doreen Steele, and lived in Bridge of Allan, while continuing to develop his stage career to theatres beyond Scotland.

In 2000 – while in London for work, and single again – he visited his old college friend Maureen Beattie one evening, and found that one of his fellow guests was Jane Paton, whom he had not seen since they left the RSAMD 25 years before. It was love at first sight, and John later said that he had fallen in love with Jane when he first met her in the 1970s, but was too shy to approach her. For the next decade, the couple lived in London, and John’s career flourished, as he undertook seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare’s Globe among other theatres, as well as continuing to work in Scotland.

In 2010, though, the couple moved to the Isle of Lewis, the original home of Jane’s grandfather. They both loved the island, eventually building their own home at Uig on the west coast, and celebrating their civil partnership in 2021 – the first non-same-sex civil partnership in Scotland, they were told. John found that he could continue to work from this island base, landing a role in Danny Boyle’s version of Frankenstein at the National Theatre in 2011, and playing alongside Maureen Beattie in Max Webster’s Regent’s Park production of As You Like It, in 2018.

Even in the last weeks of his life, he was determined to keep working and performing. In January of this year, he helped to organise, and appeared in, an online event exploring John McGrath’s early play Random Happenings In The Hebrides, which had fascinated him ever since he saw it as a schoolboy at the Lyceum in 1969; and just a week before his death, he appeared in a short film made by his Uig neighbour Laura Cameron Lewis to accompany the song Valhalla, by her husband Andrew Eaton Lewis, about an aged Viking contemplating his own death.

“I always felt John was just an actor who absolutely loved working,” says his agent Amanda Howard, who represented him throughout his career. “Whatever he was doing, wherever you went to see him perform, he was always so enthusiastic about what he was doing, whether it was Shakespeare or a new play; he just loved the whole process.” Michael Boyd describes him as “a lovely warm man, who married proper mischief with great seriousness about his work;” and his fellow actor Michael Nardone remembers “the intensity and depth in his eyes, that you got from the other side of the stage. He always said, ‘Never mind the lines, I’ll dae it wi’ a look’.”

John Stahl is survived by his partner Jane, and his mother Nan, who still lives in Sauchie; and also by a Scottish theatre and screen community that will always treasure the memory of a deeply knowledgeable and generous actor, who loved both his country and his profession with a passion, and often seemed to embody something of Scotland in his very presence, with its unique combination – to the very end – of scale and subtlety, massive strength and absolute vulnerability.

Obituaries

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