Michael Jayston

Alongside being one of the most recognisable film and television actors of his generation, Michael Jayston’s long and substantial stage career included leading roles in the West End, at the National Theatre and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Jayston could lay claim to being the only actor to have played both the Doctor in Doctor Who – as the Valeyard, a malevolent incarnation of the Time Lord in 1986 – and James Bond – in a 1991 radio adaptation of You Only Live Twice.

As the royal husband of Janet Suzman’s Tsarina in the 1971 Hollywood extravaganza Nicholas and Alexandra and British intelligence spook Guillam in TV’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), he was thrust into wider fame at the beginning and end of the 1970s. By then he was already well-established on stage.

Born in Nottingham, following his father’s death when he was just one year old and his mother’s when he was in his mid-teens, Jayston was raised by his grandmother and an uncle.

He began to act while on national service in the army and continued in amateur dramatics after being demobbed and returning home. Having trained as an accountant, he worked for the National Coal Board and briefly in a Nottingham fish market before enrolling at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama at the age of 23.

He made his professional debut with the Little Theatre in Bangor, Northern Ireland, then Salisbury Playhouse before joining the Bristol Old Vic for two seasons from 1963. From there, he went to the RSC in a company that included Glenda Jackson, Patrick Magee and Ian Richardson where notable roles included Laertes to David Warner’s Hamlet (1966) and Demetrius in Peter Hall’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed in 1968.

The RSC also gave him his only Broadway credit, replacing Ian Holm’s Lenny in The Homecoming in 1967. The same year, The Stage noted his Oswald, opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Mrs Alving, in Ibsen’s Ghosts as having a “masculine sensitivity that singles him out as an actor of unusual promise”.

With the National Theatre, he made his mark as the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer’s Equus at the Old Vic in 1974, then on tour before coming into the Albery (now Noël Coward) in 1976. He returned to the Southbank nearly 20 years later taking over from Richard Briers as Rat in Alan Bennett’s winningly charming take on The Wind in the Willows in 1994.

In the interim, he had put his signature subtlety – “quite superb… crisp and assured” – to exemplary use alongside Ralph Richardson and Michael Gambon in the thriller Alice’s Boys, directed by Lindsay Anderson (Savoy, 1978), with Maria Aitken in Noël Coward’s Private Lives (Greenwich Theatre, 1980), and, in a rare foray into musical theatre, as Captain von Trapp supporting Petula Clark’s Maria in The Sound of Music (Apollo Victoria, 1981).

He made similar claims for attention at the Chichester Festival Theatre, sharing the stage with Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright to make much of little as Mirabell in The Way of the World (transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket) in 1984, and as Colonel Whittaker in Coward’s early and rarely staged Easy Virtue in 1999. In 1992, he took over from John Woodvine at the Garrick as Jack in Patrick Mason’s premiere of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, first seen at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

Beginning the new century, he went on tour with David Hare’s Amy’s View in 2001, returning to Chichester the following year as the slow-witted and insular husband to Patricia Routledge’s deliciously daft Duchess in Wild Orchids.

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