Julian Curry

When he wasn’t on stage or TV, where he was best known as self-preening QC Claude Erskine-Brown to Leo McKern’s Rumpole of the Bailey, Julian Curry was likely to be found exploring vineyards in search of new grape varieties.

Encouraged by his oenophile parents, he became an authority on winegrowing, joining the Circle of Wine Writers and writing and starring in a widely performed one-man show, Hic!, a potted history of wine, in 2000. He also wrote and recorded the four-disc A Guide to Wine for Naxos Audiobooks in 2003.

Born in Dartington, Devon, where his father was headmaster of the recently opened private school in Dartington Hall, his maternal aunt was the Irish actor Moyna Macgill, mother of Angela Lansbury.

He began acting as a student at Cambridge (where Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Trevor Nunn counted among his peers) and quickly found work after graduating as Malvolio to McKellen’s Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1960.

He spent two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1964, appearing as the King of France alongside Eric Porter’s King Lear, directed by Nunn, in 1968, and made his mark as the Scrivener in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair the following year. Later Stratford appearances included Pam Gems’ Danton’s Affair (1986), Henry VI (1989), with Ralph Fiennes in the titular role, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (1997) and Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (2006).

A versatile character actor, for Prospect Productions he was seen as Ross to Peter Jeffrey’s Macbeth (1966) and Horatio to McKellen’s Hamlet (1971), and as Brazen in The Recruiting Officer with the Cambridge Theatre Company (1970). He made his National Theatre debut as Tiresias in Wole Soyinka’s 1973 reworking of The Bacchae, returning as Angelo in Jonathan Miller’s Measure for Measure (1975) and for Nicholas Hytner’s 2006 update of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.