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The actor and writer Gawn Grainger, highly esteemed by stage and screen audiences alike over his long career, has died at the age of 87.
His death on Saturday, surrounded by his family, was confirmed by his agent Judy Daish. He is survived by his wife, the actor Zoë Wanamaker, and by his children, Charlie and Eliza, from his previous marriage to the actor Janet Key.
A prolific performer with the National Theatre for several decades, he was Macduff opposite Anthony Hopkins’ Macbeth and appeared alongside Laurence Olivier in Saturday, Sunday, Monday and The Party when the company was based at the Old Vic in the early 1970s. His National productions included The Front Page, The Plough and the Stars, The Misanthrope and The Marriage of Figaro (in the title role) and he remained a familiar presence there through to recent plays such as Saint George and the Dragon. He was also a regular on TV, appearing in staples including Doctor Who, in which he played the engineer and “father of the railways” George Stephenson in the two-part episode The Mark of the Rani in 1985.
Born in Glasgow, Grainger was brought up in London. He was cast at the age of 12 as the Boy Prince (a non-speaking role) in Ivor Novello’s musical King’s Rhapsody, after blagging his way into Novello’s dressing room and impressing him. Active in drama and broadcasting while at school, he then went to Italia Conti drama school and appeared at Frinton Summer Theatre, Dundee Rep and Ipswich’s Arts theatre (where he appeared alongside Ian McKellen).
At Bristol Old Vic he played major roles including Romeo (opposite Jane Asher as Juliet), Laertes in Hamlet and Claudio in Measure for Measure, with all three productions touring to the US. Before arriving at the National Theatre he had a hit on Broadway with There’s a Girl in My Soup in the late 1960s, when he also appeared on the US panel show in What’s My Line? He was back in New York as Oronte in a transfer of the National Theatre production of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 1975.
Grainger appeared in Harold Pinter’s Party Time and Mountain Language (a double bill) as well as Pinter’s No Man’s Land for the Almeida in the early 1990s. His other plays included Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads by Roy Williams, Amy’s View by David Hare, Really Old, Like Forty Five by Tamsin Oglesby and Don Juan in Soho written and directed by Patrick Marber. In 2016, he replaced John Hurt in the role of Billy Rice in The Entertainer, starring Kenneth Branagh. He captured, wrote Michael Billington, that character’s “mix of Edwardian nostalgia and grumbling disillusion”.
His acting career ran alongside another as a writer for theatre and television. You Don’t Have to Walk to Fly, made for LWT in 1984, starred Bob Hoskins and Key. He adapted his own play, Four to One, for the BBC in 1986 and wrote for the series Big Deal, Trainer and Lovejoy. He resumed his collaboration with Olivier by editing the book Olivier on Acting.
Key died in 1992. Grainger married Wanamaker in 1994. Reflecting on the rich variety of roles he had played during his life as an actor, he told the Stage: “It’s been like a series of parties.”
