Peter Needham obituary

The Cheek by Jowl theatre company's two world tours of their celebrated all-male As You Like It in the 1990s launched the careers of several young actors, including Mark Benton, Tom Hollander and Adrian Lester. They were in their early 20s; Peter Needham, who has died aged 76, was entering his 60s, and played the clown Touchstone. His other roles with Cheek by Jowl included Polonius to Timothy Walker's Hamlet (1990), and Pompey and Friar Peter in Measure for Measure (1994), and his time with the company was memorable for the fresh view it took of the classics and its desire to take them on the road. Peter had shown these same qualities of enterprise with the touring group Not the National Theatre (NTNT), after his years with the National Theatre itself.

Peter was born in Nottingham and attended the then Becket grammar school in the city. From the age of 14, he was an amateur actor with the Co-operative Arts Centre, Nottingham, and won several awards at British Dramatic League festivals. He was working in the town clerk's office when he decided to train for the theatre professionally, winning a scholarship to Rada in 1952, although he was astute and cautious enough to keep up his shorthand typing all his life.

His first acting job, playing nightly rep in Mevagissey in Cornwall, honed his new skills, putting him through 36 plays in six weeks. The exhaustion told on him one night when he left the theatre halfway though the show and was back at his digs tucking into egg and chips when he remembered he had to fall out of a cupboard as a dead body for the denouement. He made it back to the theatre, had no time to change, and fell out on to the stage wearing not the 1920s tennis whites in which the corpse had been murdered, but corduroy trousers and a lambswool V-neck.

In 1955 Peter joined the Old Vic Company. Their tour of Canada the following year prompted him to emigrate there for several years. The Mevagissey training paid off when he travelled 26,000 miles in a Greyhound bus with 17 actors and a fit-up set, playing one-night stands of The Devil's Disciple and The Comedy of Errors, directed by Tony Van Bridge, in all the country's maritime provinces.

He returned to Britain in 1962 and played seasons at the powerhouses of repertory theatre in the 1960s – Liverpool Playhouse, Birmingham Rep and the Belgrade in Coventry.

From 1970 to 1984 he was at the National Theatre, appearing in Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain, and playing Azdak in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet and Tench in John Galsworthy's Strife.

In 1984, Peter formed the NTNT co-operative with his fellow actor Roger Gartland. There were exciting meetings round the supper table in Peter's flat in south-east London, and in 1985 NTNT became the first small-scale British theatre company to tour to what was then Czechoslovakia and to Romania, promoted by the Foreign Office through the British Council. Local journalists in both countries were eager to know how actors from a national theatre had been "allowed" to start up on their own, and how they could create shows without an artistic director in overall control of the process. In fact, NTNT was fulfilling the then government's ambition for creative industries – that they should be independent of a nationalised structure.

NTNT's first three productions – a double bill of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and John Mortimer's The Dock Brief in 1984, followed by Pinter's The Caretaker in 1985 – were directed by Peter. The experience gave him an empathy cherished by other directors, notably Katie Mitchell, who cast him in many productions, including The Mysteries and The Dybbuk for the RSC and Chekhov's Three Sisters for the National Theatre.

In 1993, during a break between the two world tours of As You Like It (1991-92 and 1994-95), Peter, together with Patricia Doyle, devised and performed an original play about the life and loves of his hero DH Lawrence, also from Nottingham. Son and Lover toured abroad extensively, again for the British Council: it contained lines from Lawrence's poem Song of a Man Who Has Come Through that could have been written for Peter, whose outlook on life was never constrained by age or circumstance:

I yield myself and am borrowed

By the fine, fine wind that takes its course

through the chaos of the world.

His many sporting skills included fencing, which made him the natural choice to play Baines the fencing master to Colin Firth's Mr Darcy in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice (1995). It was Peter's second role in the story: as an amateur actor aged 14 in Nottingham, he had played Mr Bennet.

As Cheek by Jowl's lighting designer, I benefited from Peter's entertaining friendship on foreign tours – and professionally from his instinctive and unerring ability to find his light onstage, just one aspect of the talent he had turned into stagecraft.

He is survived by his wife Jane; by children Ruth, Paul and Helen from his marriage to Julia Lee; by Chloe and Cassie from his marriage to Ann German; by his stepdaughters Kate and Polly; and by seven grandchildren.

Charles Peter Needham, actor, born 20 August 1932; died 7 August 2009

This article was amended on 30 October 2009. The original stated that Needham was survived by three daughters from his marriage to Julia Lee. This has been corrected.

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