John Wood, left, as Lear and Linus Roache as Edgar in the 1990 RSC production of King Lear.
John Wood, who has died aged 81, was one of the greatest stage actors of the past century, especially associated with his roles in the plays of Tom Stoppard. But a combination of his enigmatic privacy and low profile on film – he cropped up a lot without dominating a movie – meant that he remained largely unknown to the wider public.
As with all great actors, you always knew what he was thinking, all the time. Wood was especially striking in the brain-box department. Tall, forbidding and aquiline-featured, he was as much the perfect Sherlock Holmes on stage as he was the ideal Brutus. He exuded ferocious intelligence, and the twinkle in his eye could be as merciless as it was invariably amused.
As the Royal Shakespeare Company's Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1972, he was undoubtedly the noblest Roman of them all, with his severely etched profile, electrified presence and impassioned argumentativeness. This was his breakthrough performance, following a run of wonderful RSC appearances in Maxim Gorky's Enemies (1971), James Joyce's Exiles (which he had first played in Harold Pinter's revelatory production at the Mermaid in 1970) and as the funniest and most fantastical Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's glorious Restoration comedy The Man of Mode.
Wood's father was a surveyor, his mother from "yeoman stock", and he was brought up in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and Derby. He was educated at Bedford school and Jesus College, Oxford, where he read law. He had seen John Gielgud as Angelo in Peter Brook's 1950 Stratford-upon-Avon production of Measure for Measure, "and suddenly knew what I wanted to do".
He did his national service with the Royal Artillery before Oxford, where he was president of the dramatic society, the OUDS, and played Malvolio – "looking as lean, lanky and statuesque as Don Quixote," said the Oxford Mail – in a Mansfield College gardens production of Twelfth Night with Maggie Smith as Viola.
In 1954 he joined the Old Vic company (of which the young Richard Burton was the star), playing a string of small roles over two years, before making his West End debut in 1957 as a self-fulfilling Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real at the Phoenix theatre. In leaner months, Wood was a reader of new plays at George Devine's new English Stage Company at the Royal Court and thought that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was inferior to the work of Pinero. He appeared at the Court in Nigel Dennis's The Making of Moo (1957) and returned to the West End in 1961 as Henry Albertson in the whimsical off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks, at the Apollo.
He made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1967 as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and, having warmed up as Sherlock Holmes in the 1974 RSC rediscovery of William Gillette's pot-boiler, he then took definitive possession of the role that Stoppard wrote specifically for him, Henry Carr, in Travesties. Wood was devastatingly funny as the British consular official who, stationed in Zurich towards the end of the first world war, takes part in an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest and falls into a legal wrangle with the business manager, a certain James Joyce, over the cost of a pair of trousers.
Wood revealed a unique knack of conveying Stoppard's cleverness as though it were contained within his own. He cemented his Stoppard association as the strangely afflicted Ivanov, who imagines he owns an orchestra, in Stoppard's zany political oratorio Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. And the "made in heaven" artistic conjunction came full circle in 1997 when, in Richard Eyre's farewell to the National Theatre, Wood was spellbinding as the old classical scholar and poet, AE Housman, in Stoppard's The Invention of Love, managing to make intellectualism both heartbreaking and sexy.
For half an hour in that play, he sat stock still on a bench while his younger self, played by Ben Porter, poured out his dreams and fears, demonstrating that great acting needs few words; though, of course, in Wood's case, the more words were also the merrier, for few actors have ever wrung more lucid inflections in a line, and done it so easily over vast tracts, as did Wood.
This coruscating, sulphurous presence ignited on the stage while he simultaneously backed modestly out of the limelight. We knew little about him and he never joined the celebrity throng at first nights or restaurants. His real passion was architecture, which he rated the most important of all the arts.
While at Stratford, he acquired a Jacobean manor house in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, which had been remodelled in 1663. He said it was "the most magical house in England," and when asked what he did when he stayed there for months on end, he replied, "I look at it." He raised four children there (he was twice married) and paid for their education, and the house's upkeep, with frequent movie work in Hollywood and regular television appearances.
He played politicians and academics on screen, and was a notable detective once more in Jack Clayton's beautiful 1992 television film of Muriel Spark's spiky geriatric murder thriller, Memento Mori, in a stellar cast that also included Maggie Smith. He did not disown his appearances in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), nor his work alongside Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep – both of whom he admired inordinately – in Heartburn (1986). He made notable appearances, too, in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Slaughterhouse Five (1972).
But most of his film and television roles were ridiculously inferior to his talent, and he never really ventured decisively beyond the footlights, where he reigned supreme – but only sporadically. There were long periods when he simply disappeared from view, rather like Eric Porter, another great, enigmatic actor, in an earlier time.
Wood's Prospero, in The Tempest directed by Nicholas Hytner (making his RSC debut) in 1988, struck me as the best I had ever seen – and I had seen Gielgud in the role, twice. His Prospero was a demented stage manager on a theatrical island, suspended between smouldering rage at his usurpation and unbridled glee at his alternative ethereal power. He bound the entire play to his wrecked view of experience and had no qualms about playing up and down the vocal register – in the dark backward and abysm of time we did indeed plummet several throaty fathoms deep. The critic Irving Wardle said that Wood lit up the text like an electric storm, and simply had no rival as a source of nervous energy on a stage.
A year later, his Solness in Ibsen's The Master Builder, opposite Joanne Pearce in an RSC production by Adrian Noble, confounded all memories of those who had seen both Michael Redgrave and Laurence Olivier in the role. No one else conjured dreams and madness in such coruscating whispers. And no one dispensed sarcastic throwaways, or embarked on egotistical flights of vanity, with such force and energy.
Again, it was the sheer intensity of his ascent to madness in King Lear, directed at the RSC by Hytner in 1990, that made him unforgettable. Most Lears explode with anger at the start then find a way of making the rest of the play work in a sort of temperamental unravelling – Wood used that first scene to unlock his passage to his natural habitat of insanity.
It was a stylish, and shattering, performance. "Make me not mad," he declared, ambiguously, staring piteously at a wheelchair, his passport to the twilight zone of his own mighty fulfilment. Michael Billington, hailing the best King Lear since Paul Scofield's directed by Brook 30 years earlier, said that Wood "has the uncensored capacity of the very old to switch in a second from intemperate rage to sweet tenderness".
In that same Stratford season, he added a rare bonus of a vocally strangulated, tearfully regretful Don Armado in a beautiful Terry Hands production of Love's Labour's Lost – he was a spindle-shanked, decrepit remnant of the Spanish wars in a Napoleonic hat, finding unexpected lustful regeneration in the arms of a promiscuous wench (Alex Kingston, who played both Jaquenetta, and Cordelia in the Lear).
Sightings became even rarer in recent years, and an extraordinary appearance as an East End gangster in Philip Ridley's Ghost from a Perfect Place at the Hampstead theatre in 1994, quivering with menace and vanity, said one critic, was a reminder of how small actors seemed when he was not around, and how puny.
His later films included Ian McKellen's fascist Richard III (1995) – ironic, as Wood's theatrical Richard III at the National in 1979 had been a curious misfire – Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994), scripted by Alan Bennett, and Christopher Riley's Shadowlands (1993).
He seemed to have grown smaller, and more bird-like, in one of his last stage appearances, 10 years ago at the National, as the seedy old pot boy Spooner (another Gielgud role) in Pinter's No Man's Land. Darting anxious looks, and cawing like a crow, he stared in rapt admiration at Corin Redgrave's Hirst as he talked of making him a cuckold ("I'll never forget her way with my jonquils") – amazingly, he conveyed the idea that Hirst's adultery with his own wife was a thing of wonder, even beauty. Not for the first time, I was dumbstruck at the brilliance and originality of this master craftsman of the mind, his transparent rapacity of thought, his insatiable intellectual curiosity.
He was made CBE in 2007, one year after he withdrew with illness (and wisely, as it turned out) from Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues, directed by Robert Altman at the Old Vic.
He is survived by his second wife, Sylvia, and his sons, Sebastian and Rufus, and daughters, Ghislaine and Sibylla.
• John Wood, actor, born 5 July 1930; died 6 August 2011
As with all great actors, you always knew what he was thinking, all the time. Wood was especially striking in the brain-box department. Tall, forbidding and aquiline-featured, he was as much the perfect Sherlock Holmes on stage as he was the ideal Brutus. He exuded ferocious intelligence, and the twinkle in his eye could be as merciless as it was invariably amused.
As the Royal Shakespeare Company's Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1972, he was undoubtedly the noblest Roman of them all, with his severely etched profile, electrified presence and impassioned argumentativeness. This was his breakthrough performance, following a run of wonderful RSC appearances in Maxim Gorky's Enemies (1971), James Joyce's Exiles (which he had first played in Harold Pinter's revelatory production at the Mermaid in 1970) and as the funniest and most fantastical Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's glorious Restoration comedy The Man of Mode.
Wood's father was a surveyor, his mother from "yeoman stock", and he was brought up in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, and Derby. He was educated at Bedford school and Jesus College, Oxford, where he read law. He had seen John Gielgud as Angelo in Peter Brook's 1950 Stratford-upon-Avon production of Measure for Measure, "and suddenly knew what I wanted to do".
He did his national service with the Royal Artillery before Oxford, where he was president of the dramatic society, the OUDS, and played Malvolio – "looking as lean, lanky and statuesque as Don Quixote," said the Oxford Mail – in a Mansfield College gardens production of Twelfth Night with Maggie Smith as Viola.
In 1954 he joined the Old Vic company (of which the young Richard Burton was the star), playing a string of small roles over two years, before making his West End debut in 1957 as a self-fulfilling Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams's Camino Real at the Phoenix theatre. In leaner months, Wood was a reader of new plays at George Devine's new English Stage Company at the Royal Court and thought that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger was inferior to the work of Pinero. He appeared at the Court in Nigel Dennis's The Making of Moo (1957) and returned to the West End in 1961 as Henry Albertson in the whimsical off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks, at the Apollo.
He made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1967 as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and, having warmed up as Sherlock Holmes in the 1974 RSC rediscovery of William Gillette's pot-boiler, he then took definitive possession of the role that Stoppard wrote specifically for him, Henry Carr, in Travesties. Wood was devastatingly funny as the British consular official who, stationed in Zurich towards the end of the first world war, takes part in an amateur production of The Importance of Being Earnest and falls into a legal wrangle with the business manager, a certain James Joyce, over the cost of a pair of trousers.
Wood revealed a unique knack of conveying Stoppard's cleverness as though it were contained within his own. He cemented his Stoppard association as the strangely afflicted Ivanov, who imagines he owns an orchestra, in Stoppard's zany political oratorio Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Royal Festival Hall in 1977. And the "made in heaven" artistic conjunction came full circle in 1997 when, in Richard Eyre's farewell to the National Theatre, Wood was spellbinding as the old classical scholar and poet, AE Housman, in Stoppard's The Invention of Love, managing to make intellectualism both heartbreaking and sexy.
For half an hour in that play, he sat stock still on a bench while his younger self, played by Ben Porter, poured out his dreams and fears, demonstrating that great acting needs few words; though, of course, in Wood's case, the more words were also the merrier, for few actors have ever wrung more lucid inflections in a line, and done it so easily over vast tracts, as did Wood.
This coruscating, sulphurous presence ignited on the stage while he simultaneously backed modestly out of the limelight. We knew little about him and he never joined the celebrity throng at first nights or restaurants. His real passion was architecture, which he rated the most important of all the arts.
While at Stratford, he acquired a Jacobean manor house in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, which had been remodelled in 1663. He said it was "the most magical house in England," and when asked what he did when he stayed there for months on end, he replied, "I look at it." He raised four children there (he was twice married) and paid for their education, and the house's upkeep, with frequent movie work in Hollywood and regular television appearances.
He played politicians and academics on screen, and was a notable detective once more in Jack Clayton's beautiful 1992 television film of Muriel Spark's spiky geriatric murder thriller, Memento Mori, in a stellar cast that also included Maggie Smith. He did not disown his appearances in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), nor his work alongside Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep – both of whom he admired inordinately – in Heartburn (1986). He made notable appearances, too, in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Slaughterhouse Five (1972).
But most of his film and television roles were ridiculously inferior to his talent, and he never really ventured decisively beyond the footlights, where he reigned supreme – but only sporadically. There were long periods when he simply disappeared from view, rather like Eric Porter, another great, enigmatic actor, in an earlier time.
Wood's Prospero, in The Tempest directed by Nicholas Hytner (making his RSC debut) in 1988, struck me as the best I had ever seen – and I had seen Gielgud in the role, twice. His Prospero was a demented stage manager on a theatrical island, suspended between smouldering rage at his usurpation and unbridled glee at his alternative ethereal power. He bound the entire play to his wrecked view of experience and had no qualms about playing up and down the vocal register – in the dark backward and abysm of time we did indeed plummet several throaty fathoms deep. The critic Irving Wardle said that Wood lit up the text like an electric storm, and simply had no rival as a source of nervous energy on a stage.
A year later, his Solness in Ibsen's The Master Builder, opposite Joanne Pearce in an RSC production by Adrian Noble, confounded all memories of those who had seen both Michael Redgrave and Laurence Olivier in the role. No one else conjured dreams and madness in such coruscating whispers. And no one dispensed sarcastic throwaways, or embarked on egotistical flights of vanity, with such force and energy.
Again, it was the sheer intensity of his ascent to madness in King Lear, directed at the RSC by Hytner in 1990, that made him unforgettable. Most Lears explode with anger at the start then find a way of making the rest of the play work in a sort of temperamental unravelling – Wood used that first scene to unlock his passage to his natural habitat of insanity.
It was a stylish, and shattering, performance. "Make me not mad," he declared, ambiguously, staring piteously at a wheelchair, his passport to the twilight zone of his own mighty fulfilment. Michael Billington, hailing the best King Lear since Paul Scofield's directed by Brook 30 years earlier, said that Wood "has the uncensored capacity of the very old to switch in a second from intemperate rage to sweet tenderness".
In that same Stratford season, he added a rare bonus of a vocally strangulated, tearfully regretful Don Armado in a beautiful Terry Hands production of Love's Labour's Lost – he was a spindle-shanked, decrepit remnant of the Spanish wars in a Napoleonic hat, finding unexpected lustful regeneration in the arms of a promiscuous wench (Alex Kingston, who played both Jaquenetta, and Cordelia in the Lear).
Sightings became even rarer in recent years, and an extraordinary appearance as an East End gangster in Philip Ridley's Ghost from a Perfect Place at the Hampstead theatre in 1994, quivering with menace and vanity, said one critic, was a reminder of how small actors seemed when he was not around, and how puny.
His later films included Ian McKellen's fascist Richard III (1995) – ironic, as Wood's theatrical Richard III at the National in 1979 had been a curious misfire – Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994), scripted by Alan Bennett, and Christopher Riley's Shadowlands (1993).
He seemed to have grown smaller, and more bird-like, in one of his last stage appearances, 10 years ago at the National, as the seedy old pot boy Spooner (another Gielgud role) in Pinter's No Man's Land. Darting anxious looks, and cawing like a crow, he stared in rapt admiration at Corin Redgrave's Hirst as he talked of making him a cuckold ("I'll never forget her way with my jonquils") – amazingly, he conveyed the idea that Hirst's adultery with his own wife was a thing of wonder, even beauty. Not for the first time, I was dumbstruck at the brilliance and originality of this master craftsman of the mind, his transparent rapacity of thought, his insatiable intellectual curiosity.
He was made CBE in 2007, one year after he withdrew with illness (and wisely, as it turned out) from Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues, directed by Robert Altman at the Old Vic.
He is survived by his second wife, Sylvia, and his sons, Sebastian and Rufus, and daughters, Ghislaine and Sibylla.
• John Wood, actor, born 5 July 1930; died 6 August 2011
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