Murray Melvin, gifted actor on stage and film praised for A Taste of Honey and The Devils – obituary

Murray Melvin, the actor who has died aged 90, was a leading member of one of the most significant post-war companies in the British theatre, playing key roles under the direction of the pioneering Joan Littlewood in two of her Theatre Workshop’s biggest international hits, A Taste of Honey and The Hostage. More recently he became known to younger audiences for his role in Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood.

Slim, small-built, dark-haired, long-faced, pale and sparrow-like, Melvin had a long nose which he could look down haughtily for many of his Cockney comic effects, but it was as Geoff in A Taste of Honey (1958), one of the first serious portraits of a young homosexual character on the legitimate London stage, that Melvin made his name.

With what one critic called “a miracle of tact and sincerity”, in his first major stage role Melvin played the tender-hearted friend of the pregnant heroine, a schoolgirl, in Shelagh Delaney’s first play while he was still a student actor. Later that year he played the timid Cockney prisoner awaiting execution by the Irish Republican Army in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), the whole cast of which had been threatened with assassination by the IRA on the opening night at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London.

“If they did shoot,” Melvin recalled, “the first person to go would have been me, the British soldier. Nothing happened of course. The theatre was ringed by Scotland Yard, and one critic said that if the IRA had been there they would not have been able to shoot straight for laughing.”

To most of his characterisations with Theatre Workshop Melvin brought a kindly, diffident and vulnerable air of endearing effeminacy. “I was so skinny,” he recalled years later, “the woman living in the house next door took pity on me and made me a batch of fairy cakes each day.”

At all events, his warm if weedy presence made an often witty contrast to the brash, broad-based tradition of spontaneous music-hall comedy which was Joan Littlewood’s trade mark.

He went on to play numerous leading roles not only in other Theatre Workshop hits like Oh What a Lovely War, which transferred to the West End and Broadway, but also in film versions of A Taste of Honey (1961) and the kitchen-sink comedy Sparrers Can’t Sing (filmed in 1963 as Sparrows Can’t Sing).

When Theatre Workshop folded in the mid-1960s Melvin remained in demand as an actor in the West End and increasingly took small but crucial roles in the film studio. His big-screen credits included Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie, in which he played the working-class anti-hero Michael Caine’s pal Nat. (“It was a breakthough film,” he recalled. “And there was an awful lot to break through.”)

He played the scheming old priest Father Mignon in his friend Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), the obsequious Reverend Runt in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and Beau Didapper in Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews (1977). Other film highlights came in The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones, The Boy Friend and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

Murray Melvin was born in London on August 10 1932 and grew up in Hampstead. He did his National Service with the RAF and was planning to become a shipping clerk before his taste for the theatre took him in his twenties to see such Littlewood productions at Stratford East as Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Offered a place and a grant to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, young Melvin suggested to Theatre Workshop’s manager, Gerry Raffles, that instead of taking up the Guildhall place, he should join Theatre Workshop as a student and assistant stage manager and use the grant as wages.

Raffles agreed, and Melvin began by painting the front of the Theatre Royal, Stratford. “Within an hour of me getting up on to that ladder,” he said, “most of the people in the houses next to the theatre knew exactly what I was doing, where I came from and what I wanted to do.

“My second job was to paint the foyer. That was the introduction to my university, and university is what it was.”

His first professional stage appearance was at the Theatre Royal in 1957 as a supernumerary in Littlewood’s modern-dress revival of Macbeth. He played Belli in Pirandello’s Man, Beast and Virtue and the rich young man Calisto in Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina before his success in A Taste of Honey.

“There were five people in the play because they couldn’t afford six,” Melvin recalled. “My character wasn’t fully understood. They usually referred to him as waif-like: but when the second production was mounted they went screaming overboard for it. It was realised what an important step it had been in the historical context of the theatre.

“Then of course we had a Lord Chamberlain (as official stage censor) and when the film came along it was X certificate – now it’s an O-level text.”

A Taste of Honey transferred to the West End, first to Wyndham’s in 1959 and then the Criterion, with Melvin as the gentle art student who befriended the schoolgirl when her black sailor-lover disappeared, leaving her with child. Melvin was the only leading actor from the stage production to keep his role in Tony Richardson’s 1961 film, Avis Bunnage as the mother being replaced by Dora Bryan and Frances Cuka as the girl by Rita Tushingham.

Other Theatre Workshop roles included Scrooge’s Nephew in A Christmas Carol (1958), Sam in William Saroyan’s Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All (1960), Brainworm in Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (Paris Theatre Festival), and Knocker Jug in Stephen Lewis’s Sparrers Can’t Sing (1960), a role which had not existed at the first read-through with Joan Littlewood of the lively tale of an East End community, except in reference to “a bloke with red boots”.

Littlewood asked Melvin, who had found the reading funny, if he wanted to be in it. “I began rehearsals playing a character who isn’t even in the play. In the end I had a major part, that of Knocker Jug.”

After a stint in the Keith Waterhouse-Willis Hall revue, England, Our England (Prince’s, now Shaftesbury, 1962), Melvin was back with Theatre Workshop as a Pierrot in the musical, Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963), which transferred to Wyndham’s (and New York, 1964), and he had four parts, Gadshill, Mortimer, Sir Richard Vernon and Shadow, in Littlewood’s notorious conflation of the two parts of Henry IV at the Edinburgh Festival in 1964.

On Broadway that year Melvin also played for the first time the Devil in Stravinsky’s musical play, The Soldier’s Tale, a part he was to repeat at the Proms in London 11 years later. Later West End credits included Jonathan in Arthur Kopit’s farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You In The Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (Piccadilly, 1965); the Orderly in Press Cuttings and Adolphus in Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, part of a triple George Bernard Shaw bill (Mermaid 1967); Bouzin, the victimised lawyer, in Feydeau’s Cat Among the Pigeons (adapted by John Mortimer, Prince of Wales 1969).

He remained busy in the theatre through the next decade – as the Speaker in Facade (Queen Elizabeth Hall); Convict Gilbert in Kidnapped at Christmas and its sequel Christmas Crackers (Shaw); the Marquis of Dorset in The Dark Horse (Comedy); W B Bunkaus in Hoagy, Bix and Wolfgang Beethoven Bunkhaus (Round House, Chalk Farm); the Dauphin in Shaw’s Saint Joan (Leatherhead); and the Valet in French Dressing (Gardner Centre, Brighton).

In 1971 he played the Speaker in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Missa super l’homme armé, and later directed his works, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot (1974) and The Martyrdom of St Magnus, as well as the German composer Hans Werner Henze’s Raft of the Medusa (1977).

He had numerous other film credits from the 1960s to the 1990s, ranging from Suspect, The Criminal and Petticoat Pirates to Shout At the Devil, The Prince and the Pauper, Stories From A Flying Trunk and Let Him Have It.

In his seventies Melvin featured as the prissy conductor in Joel Schumacher’s film of The Phantom of the Opera, shot in 2003 on the same Pinewood studios lot where more than 30 years earlier he had worked on The Devils with Ken Russell; and he won plaudits for his portrayal of the time-travelling baddie Bilis Manger in Torchwood on BBC television from 2006.

Murray Melvin devoted his final years to assembling an archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1884-2017), where he also served on the board. He completed the work in 2020 and the Murray Melvin Archive – a treasure trove for scholars including programmes, script material, props, photographs and Joan Littlewood’s cast notes – was donated to the British Library.

Murray Melvin, born August 10 1932, died April 14 2023