No one who saw Clive Revill, who has died aged 94, on stage or screen thought he was anything less than a superb actor. However, for one who enjoyed such a distinguished career, he was surprisingly little known to the general public. It was as though he operated under the radar. He was twice nominated for a Tony award on Broadway, worked three times in startlingly different productions with the great stage director Peter Brook, and twice with the film director Billy Wilder.
But his career did not gather momentum once he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, and his last major Broadway appearance, as a “weirdly colourful” (according to one critic) nemesis to Donald Sutherland’s professor in an Edward Albee adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita in 1980, was commercially disastrous.
The pilot show he went to make in Hollywood did not generate the hoped-for television series, and he thereafter made a string of guest appearances in episodes of Columbo (starring Peter Falk), Hart to Hart (with Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers), Murder She Wrote (with Angela Lansbury) and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
After leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Chichester Festival theatre and on Broadway, he lent his great power as a leading character actor to such original British television writing as Nigel Kneale’s Bam! Pow! Zap! (1969), a bleak satire on cinematic violence, Alun Owen’s The Piano Player (1972) and David Hare’s first film as both writer and director, Licking Hitler (1978), about the black propaganda unit broadcasting to Germany during the second world war. This period marked his career pinnacle.
Revill was stocky and pugnacious, with a Mr Punch-style nose, piercing blue eyes and red hair, physical attributes that were disguised on stage as he usually played much older than his years.
He was born in Wellington, New Zealand, the son of Eleanor (nee Neel) and Malet Revill, and was educated at Rongotai College and Victoria University in Wellington. He trained as an accountant but took a career swerve into theatre when he played Sebastian in a 1950 production of Twelfth Night in Auckland. He came to Britain, training at the Old Vic school before, remarkably, making a Broadway debut as Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers in 1952.
He then returned to Britain and played for two years at the Ipswich Rep and made a London debut in 1955 at the Arts Theatre in Peter Hall’s production of a Vivian Ellis children’s musical, Listen to the Wind. He played a wicked butler, spiriting away three children from their East Anglian nurse to the gypsies; Ronnie Barker was the Gypsy Man.
His first television role, a leading one, was in a family business saga, The Makepeace Story (1955), directed by Tony Richardson for the BBC (John Osborne and Maggie Smith, also making TV debuts, had walk-on parts). The big break came with an invitation to play two seasons, from 1956 to 1958, at the Shakespeare Memorial theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, where his roles included the First Player to Alan Badel’s Hamlet, Barnardine (the prisoner who refuses to wake up for his own execution) in Measure for Measure, Cloten in Cymbeline, and Trinculo in Brook’s production of The Tempest with John Gielgud as Prospero; this spectacularly designed show also played a season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
In the following year, Brook cast him as third lead in a delightful musical, Irma La Douce (1958), starring Elizabeth Seal and Keith Michell, with a score by the French composer Marguerite Monnot and book and lyrics by the British trio of David Heneker, Monty Norman and Julian More. Revill was a jack-in-the-box barman and played the role for two years at the Lyric before going to New York in 1960 and winning a Tony nomination for his performance. His second Tony nomination came three seasons later when he played Fagin in Lionel Bart’s hit musical Oliver! (Ron Moody had introduced the role in London).
In 1964, he joined the RSC at the Aldwych theatre to play Jean Paul-Marat in Brook’s sensational production of Marat/Sade (with Patrick Magee, Glenda Jackson and Ian Richardson) and, his greatest performance, Barabas in Clifford Williams’s white-walled Mediterranean revival of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (“As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, and kill sick people groaning under walls. Sometimes I go about and poison wells …”). He never returned to Stratford, though.
Over the next 10 years, Revill made a string of interesting, enjoyable movies: supporting Laurence Olivier and Noël Coward in Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing (1965); Warren Beatty and Susannah York in Kaleidoscope (1966); as a Scots orderly and a fake sheikh in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966), with Monica Vitti and Dirk Bogarde; and as one of Oliver Reed’s “moral” gang of killers, infiltrated by a journalist (Diana Rigg), in Basil Dearden’s The Assassination Bureau (1969).
Back on stage in Chichester in 1968, he played Caliban in The Tempest, the general in Peter Ustinov’s The Unknown Soldier and His Wife, and Mr Antrobus in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. For Wilder, he supported Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), now a cult classic, and won a Golden Globe nomination as a flustered hotel manager, Carlo Carlucci, in Avanti! (1972), a black comedy of hidden corpses and seduction in the sunshine, starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet Mills.
He returned to the RSC, and Broadway, in 1975 when he took over as Moriarty in William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes starring John Wood, and he succeeded George Rose on a US national tour of the musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
He voiced the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, and his later film work consisted mainly of voiceovers in animated series, cartoons and video games. His great passion was golf, and he also held a pilot’s licence.
Two marriages ended in divorce. Revill is survived by a daughter, Kate, from his second marriage, in 1978, to Suzi Schor.
• Clive Selsby Revill, actor, born 18 April 1930; died 11 March 2025
