David Warner

Warner’s early life was unsettled and peripatetic. Born in Manchester to Ada Hattersley and Herbert Warner, he attended eight different boarding schools and failed every exam he sat. Luckily one of his teachers encouraged his thespian inclinations, casting him as “the tallest ever Lady Macbeth” in a school production. His father suggested he should apply to drama school and he won a place at RADA.

One of his earliest breaks on graduating was the role of Tom Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) at London’s Royal Court, directed by Tony Richardson, which in turn led to the standout role of Blifil, the disagreeable prig, in Richardson’s Oscar-winning film Tom Jones the following year. It was the start of a prolific six-decade career as a film and TV actor. It also brought him to the notice of Hall.

Prior to his Hamlet, Warner played Henry VI for Hall in the RSC’s The Wars of the Roses trilogy, adapted from the three Henry plays and Richard III. The BBC filmed them, reaching a wider audience in 1965 and 1966. Warner expressed surprise at Hall’s invitation to play Hamlet, claiming: “I’m really a character actor.”

Impressed by his Hamlet, the film director Karel Reisz cast Warner in the title role of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), part of the new-wave British cinema of that era. Warner’s quixotic fantasist, desperately trying to prevent his wife (Vanessa Redgrave) from remarrying could almost have been a descendant of Hamlet. Its alternative wackiness and lyrical script made Morgan a fashionable hit at the time.

While continuing to take on classical roles with the RSC – including Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Warner began to look further afield for challenging work, appearing as Konstantin in Sidney Lumet’s 1968 film of The Seagull, and a disreputable minister in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), the first of three films he made for Sam Peckinpah.

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Following an accident in which Warner sustained fractures to both feet, he returned to the screen in Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 thriller, Straw Dogs, playing a hostile Cornishman. While appearing in Richardson’s 1972 production of I, Claudius, Warner suffered an attack of stage fright that put him off returning to theatre for the next 30 years.

“I looked at the stage and it became tiny. I perspired and said to myself: ‘How can they learn all the lines? How can they stand in front of all those people?’ I don’t know where the obsession came from,” he told Coveney.

For years, Hall continued to invite him to return to the RSC and Warner always made some excuse not to.

But there was never any shortage of film and TV work in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, especially after he settled in Hollywood in 1987. Turning points for Warner included The Omen (1976), in which he played a sympathetic photographer who is shockingly decapitated, and the award-winning mini-series Holocaust (1978), in which he played Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the holocaust. He also displayed his comedy chops in The Man with Two Brains, the 1983 Steve Martin film.

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In 2001, he bit the bullet and returned to the stage in New York in a revival of Shaw’s Major Barbara, as the arms dealer Andrew Undershaft, a role he reinvented as a power broker, motivated by his quiet, intense love for his daughter, Major Barbara, played by Cherry Jones.

Clearly the experience restored Warner’s confidence and led to his return to the London stage in 2002 in The Feast of Snails, which critic Michael Billington described as a “seriously weird Icelandic import”.

However, it was all part of Warner’s theatrical rehabilitation process and in 2005 he was ready for a return to classical theatre, giving his long-awaited King Lear at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre. If the reviews were less than ecstatic, everyone agreed that the return to the stage of a once iconic actor was a cause for celebration.

The writer and dramatist Brian Sibley, who worked with Warner on several radio dramatisations, described him as “modest and self-effacing”, adding that he was “a player of phenomenal and nuanced talent, and it was always a talent lightly worn”.

David Hattersley Warner was born on July 29, 1941, and died on July 24, aged 80. He is survived by his children Melissa and Luke, and by his partner, the actor Lisa Bowerman.