The start of postwar theatre in London was signalled by the birth of the Old Vic school in the rubble of the bombed theatre in Waterloo in 1948, and the reopening of the Old Vic itself in 1950. The actor Lee Montague, who has died aged 97, was a founding student at the school and “walked on” in Twelfth Night, the first professional production in the postwar era at the Vic.
His subsequent stage career included Old Vic seasons separated by 10 years. He played Face (his great friend, Leo McKern, was Subtle) in the visionary genius Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, the last show on the Old Vic stage before Laurence Olivier moved back in at the head of the new National Theatre company in 1963.
Montague, a powerful and sturdy presence on stage, film and television for over six decades, went with Olivier and Vivien Leigh on the famous 1957 European tour of Peter Brook’s sensational revival of Titus Andronicus (he was Demetrius, killed and baked in a pie served to his mother, Tamara, queen of the Goths). This production had first been seen during the 1955 Stratford-upon-Avon season (five years before the RSC was formed by Peter Hall), during which Montague also appeared alongside Olivier and Leigh in Twelfth Night (moving up the cast list as Fabian), Keith Michell and Joyce Redman in All’s Well That Ends Well, and Olivier as Macbeth.
His film career, which later included two Franco Zeffirelli movies – Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), in which he played the father of the future Saint Francis of Assisi, and the four-part TV epic Jesus of Nazareth (1977, starring Robert Powell) in which he played the prophet Habakkuk – as well as Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974), began in 1952 when he played the club owner Maurice Joyant in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge starring José Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
He was also the first ever storyteller on BBC television’s long-running children’s programme Jackanory, relating 15 episodes in 1965-66.
His stage career covered seasons at the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Exchange in Manchester in the 1970s while, on television, he starred in an acclaimed production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, directed by Joan Kemp-Welch, in 1960 – the play had been excoriated by most theatre critics two years earlier – as the sinister Goldberg. For this, he won a TV actor of the year award from the guild of TV producers and directors.
Coincidentally, he was born as Goldberg – Leonard Goldberg – in Bow, east London, where he was educated at the Coopers’ Company school before training at the Old Vic school and changing his name. His mother was Lithuanian, his father, who was a tailor in the East End, Russian; they had met on the boat bringing them to Britain.
On his return to the Old Vic, for the 1951-52 season, he played major supporting roles in two Guthrie productions: the euphoniously named warrior general Usumcasane in Christopher Marlowe’s epic Tamburlaine starring Donald Wolfit (whom he also understudied) and Flaminius in Timon of Athens. He was also Edmund (“God, stand up for bastards!”) to Stephen Murray’s King Lear, with Coral Browne as Regan.
He made an auspicious Broadway debut in 1952, as the lead character, Gregory Hawke, in Moss Hart’s last play, The Climate of Eden. Hawke joined a family of missionaries in the jungle of British Guyana, discovering that love can help solve the problems of civilisation – and of Hawke’s accumulated doubts and neuroses.
Back in Britain, he was Ambrose Kemper in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (template for the musical Hello, Dolly!) at the Haymarket in a company led by Ruth Gordon as Dolly Levi and, after the Titus tour, the bartender Rocky – “funny, dour and truthful”, said Kenneth Tynan – in Peter Wood’s landmark first British production in 1958 of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (with Ian Bannen in the lead) at the Arts and the Winter Garden.
He confirmed his leading actor status in that last Old Vic season, playing, as well as Face, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Angelo in Measure for Measure. And in 1965, at the Royal Court, he played a leading role (alongside Liz Fraser and Roy Kinnear) in Charles Wood’s Meals on Wheels, a satire on provincial conservatism and censorship – the first play directed by John Osborne.
In the same year, he returned to Broadway in the US premiere of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, alongside Sheila Hancock as his sister and Dudley Sutton (as he had been a year earlier in London) as the titular object of their not so fraternal affections. Both play and performances were enthusiastically reviewed.
One of his favourite roles was that of Irving Spaatz in Paddy Chayevsky’s The Latent Heterosexual for the RSC, directed by Terry Hands, at the Aldwych in 1970. He played a gay writer who marries a woman for tax purposes and ends up enjoying himself. Another favourite was Iago (to Alan Badel’s Othello) at the Oxford Playhouse in 1970, followed by a season at the Bristol Old Vic in 1971-72 in two more tremendous roles, Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Lophakin, the serf’s son turned property owner, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Over 10 years in Manchester, he played three cracking roles in Thornton Wilder’s surreal 1942 farce The Skin of Our Teeth; the lubricious Barney Cashman in Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers (this transferred to the Criterion in London); and Cyprien, a prime minister of justice caught (nearly) with his trousers down in Court in the Act, a Feydeau-esque French farce directed by Braham Murray.
His last London stage appearances, in 1981-82, were as a bullying tailor in Jean-Claude Grumberg’s The Workshop, translated by Tom Kempinski, at Hampstead theatre (Michael Billington said that “with his constant look of hurt [Montague] is the very embodiment of the good-natured slavedriver, the put-upon exploiter who reserves his compassion for outside office hours”), and a colourful double as Raymond Chandler and a disgruntled cop in a witty Chandler pastiche, Private Dick, at the Whitehall Theatre, co-written and directed by Roger Michell, with Powell as Chandler’s Marlowe.
Montague’s later television work included Whose Love Is It Anyway (2008) by David Renwick, in a BBC Love Soup series, co-starring Tamsin Greig and Sheridan Smith, in which Montague, as the dying husband of a gold-digging wife, annoyingly (to her) recovers after suddenly falling in love with his housekeeper/ironing lady.
Living in Hampstead, north London, with his wife, the actor Ruth Goring (nee Gorb), whom he married in 1955, Montague led the campaign to save the Keats Grove library as a community library, after Camden council decided to axe it.
Ruth died in 2023. Monty, as he was generally known, is survived by their son, Danny, and daughter, Sophie.
• Lee Montague (Leonard Goldberg), actor, born 16 October 1927; died 30 March 2025
• This article was amended on 4 April 2025. Meals on Wheels was the first play directed by John Osborne, but not the only one, as an earlier version stated.
