Outstanding RSC actor: Tony Church

Few actors would care to remember ever being booed by an audience. However Tony Church, always a fine raconteur, decidedly enjoyed recalling his Broadway appearance in Rolf Hochhuth's controversial Soldiers (Billy Rose, NY, 1968); playing the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, he had a climactic scene attacking Winston Churchill's pattern bombing of Dresden, with the concluding accusation that Churchill was betraying his own people, an onslaught which, as Church exited, brought him a torrent of heckling.

That performance was an earnest of Church's commitment always to play the character from the character's point of view. He made a handful of small- and large-screen appearances but a near-sacerdotal devotion to the stage was at his core for a remarkable career of over six decades as actor, director, teacher and pioneer of new ventures, stamped especially by long periods as an outstanding member of strong Royal Shakespeare Company ensembles.

London-born, Church was stage-struck from his schooldays at Hurstpierpoint College. At Cambridge he was part of a talented undergraduate era – Peter Hall, John Barton and Peter Wood were contemporaries – and he was busy with theatrical ventures throughout his time at Clare College. With Barton he was part of the touring Elizabethan Theatre Company. Then, for Hall at the Oxford Playhouse, he was part of the repertory company prior to appearing in Hall's West End production of Ugo Betti's whimsical Summertime (Apollo, 1955).

Church became a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company under Hall in 1960. He remained affiliated with the enterprise for 30 years, playing a genuinely remarkable range of roles, marked always by his effortless command on stage and by his rich, flexible voice. He was a striking Cornwall in Peter Brook's production of King Lear (1962), a delightfully dithering Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost (1965), a remarkably chilly Polonius, master of Elsinore's realpolitik in Hall's production of Hamlet with the young David Warner and, unforgettably, a progressively care-cankered title character in both parts of Henry IV (1966) for Hall's revelatory Wars of the Roses cycle.

Modern work for the company included Newton in Brook's austere scrutiny of Durrenmatt's The Physicists (Aldwych, 1963) and the Judge in The Investigation (1965). Church was given a leave of absence from the company to become the first director of Exeter's Northcott Theatre in 1967; he played in several productions and directed Twelfth Night and The Boy Friend among others before Soldiers on Broadway and then his return to the RSC.

This period saw some of Church's finest RSC work, not least his rotting, lubricious Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida (1969). Even under billows of grey beard and wiggery, amidst the Celtic mists of the trouble-beset epic Islands of the Mighty (1973) by John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy, he emerged with credit, and in happier surroundings he featured strongly as John of Gaunt in Richard II and as a Quixotic tragi-comic figure as Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost (both 1973).

For the RSC's great lost talent Buzz Goodbody, Church reached some magnificent heights in the title role of King Lear (1974) beautifully scaled for the Place, and was in superbly authoritative form as Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida (1976). During 1983-88 Church also was Director of Drama at the Guildhall School before a reunion with Peter Hall at the close of Hall's time at the National Theatre, when he played the title role in Cymbeline, a touchingly dignified Gonzalo in The Tempest and Antigonus in The Winter's Tale (1988).

In the 1990s, largely because of the efforts of Donald Seawell, a Denver-based lawyer and RSC governor, Church became vitally linked to the Denver Center Theatre Company and in 2003 the Church-Hall-Barton-Seawell-RSC axis brought about the achievement of Barton's Greek epic Tantalus (Denver and Barbican).

Church's screen career included Hall's version of Henry Livings's play Eh? as Work is a Four-Letter Word (1967) and Roman Polanski's Tess (1979). On television he had strong roles in prestigious costume-series such as Lillie (1978) and Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978).

However Church was the complete theatre animal, self-confessedly committed to the stage. In 2004 he was rehearsing Tubal in The Merchant of Venice in Denver – it would have marked extraordinarily, a ninth appearance in the play – but he became too ill to open. Most fittingly, none the less, he was able to appear alongside a host of old colleagues and more recent RSC actors on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Memorial Theatre before its closure for reconstruction last year.

Alan Strachan

James Anthony Church, actor and director: born London 11 May 1930; Associate Artist, RSC 1960-87; founder director, Northcott Theatre, Exeter 1967-71; Director of Drama, Guildhall School of Music and Drama 1982-88; Dean, National Theatre Conservatory, Denver 1989-96 (Emeritus); married 1958 Margaret Blakeney (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 2003), 2003 Mary Gladstone; died London 25 March 2008.