The actor and director Murray Melvin, who has died aged 90, had a rich and varied career in theatre, film and television, his outlook shaped by his experience in the late 1950s of working for Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. He was a pivotal member of her company, played crucial roles in A Taste of Honey, The Hostage and Oh What a Lovely War and passionately believed in passing on the legacy of her work to the next generation. In 1991 he also became the Theatre Royal’s archivist, and assembled a mass of invaluable material that in 2021 was donated to the British Library.
In a long career Melvin worked in many different media and invested everything he did with a physical precision he attributed to his early training in classical dance. In 1962 he won the best actor award at Cannes for his performance in Tony Richardson’s film of A Taste of Honey and went on to appear in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and beome a favourite actor of Ken Russell. His television career extended from being bumped off in the first episode of The Avengers (1961) to playing the sinister Bilis Manger in the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood (2007).
As a director, his work ranged from pantomimes written by Graeme Garden to opera performances in the Royal Albert Hall. But at the heart of everything he did was his devotion to Littlewood and to the theatre in Stratford East: to anyone researching its history he was a spry, charming and infallibly informative guide.
Born in St Pancras in central London, Murray was the only child of Maisie (nee Driscoll) and Hugh Melvin, an RAF officer. After leaving secondary school at 14 he had a number of unsatisfying jobs that included working as clerk and secretary to the director of the RAF sports board. His real joy lay in studying drama, mime and classical ballet at the City Literary Institute, and in September 1957 he decided to audition for the prestigious, if penurious, Theatre Workshop. He was instantly snapped up and, with the aid of a small grant from the Co-operative Society, was employed as dogsbody, assistant stage manager and small-part actor.
He made such an impression that when, in May 1958, Littlewood was casting Geoff, the boy who lovingly tends the pregnant heroine of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, she knew where to look. “Murray,” she wrote in her memoir, “was always making tea, tidying the green room, taking care of us – Geoff to the life.” Especially striking was Melvin’s compassionate understanding of the quietly gay Geoff: Lindsay Anderson, reviewing the production in a theatrical magazine, called his performance “a miracle of tact and sincerity”. Dirk Bogarde later told a surprised Melvin, who did not feel he was beating any particular drum, that his performance did more for the cause of homosexuality than the whole of the film Victim.
Melvin’s success in A Taste of Honey made him natural casting six months later for the 18-year-old soldier held captive by the IRA in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage: it was Melvin’s favourite role and his only regret was that he could not appear in the West End transfer because he was playing in A Taste of Honey. But Oh What a Lovely War in 1963 was to prove the company’s greatest hit. “For the actors,” he said, “it was a voyage of discovery in that Joan assigned us all reading-lists on which we had to report, and some mornings we came into the rehearsal room in tears at the horror of it all. But, for all Joan’s air of seeming improvisation, you must remember that her shows were as carefully structured as a Mozart symphony.”
After Lovely War ended its London and New York run in 1964, Melvin was rapidly employed in other media. His films for Russell included The Devils and The Boy Friend (both 1971) and he became a lifelong friend of the director. For Lewis Gilbert he was in two films: HMS Defiant (1962), where his love of sailing meant he had no qualms when required to shin up the rigging to the crow’s nest, and Alfie (1966) where he played Michael Caine’s closest male confidant. He appeared in five films by Peter Medak and two by Christine Edzard (Little Dorrit, 1987 and As You Like It, 1992), and went on to play a conductor and musical director in Joel Schumacher’s film of The Phantom of the Opera (2004).
With his poker-backed frame, swept-back hair and handsome, hawk-like profile, Melvin was also a regular on television. He appeared in one-off plays by Shaw and Pirandello, Russell’s imaginative films about Isadora Duncan (1966) and Samuel Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1978) and popular hits such as Bugs (1997) and Jonathan Creek (1998). Although he allegedly could not read music, he made a success of directing The Martyrdom of St Magnus by Peter Maxwell Davies and The Raft of the Medusa by Hans Werner Henze in BBC Proms performances in 1977.
In my own encounters with him I was always struck by his affability, apparent agelessness and almost Edwardian courtesy. The former Stratford East director Kerry Kyriacos Michael noted how keen Melvin was on “honouring Joan by doing everything possible for the next generation. He had great personal integrity and turned down a CBE in protest at the government’s treatment of the Windrush generation. And he was the epitome of style,his friends including the choreographer Matthew Bourne and the designer-director Philip Prowse.”
He also had the dignity of solitude: in the absence of any lifetime partner or surviving relatives, Melvin named Michael as his next of kin.
• Murray Melvin, actor, director and archivist, born 10 August 1932; died 14 April 2023
