[5] He appeared in The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company's celebrated 1956–1958 season of productions in Stratford, which included Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and The Tempest.

He made his Broadway debut in 1952, playing Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers, and subsequently appeared in Irma La Douce, The Incomparable Max and Oliver!, for which his Fagin was nominated for a Tony Award.

[8] His red hair and distinctive Mr. Punch-like features often saw him cast as comic eccentrics in a number of British films of the 1960s and 1970s such as Kaleidoscope (1966), Modesty Blaise (1966), The Double Man (1967), Fathom (1967), The Assassination Bureau (1969), A Severed Head (1970), The Black Windmill (1974) and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing (1975).

He played both Ko-Ko (the starring role) in The Mikado, and the title character, John Wellington Wells, in The Sorcerer for the Brent Walker television series of Gilbert and Sullivan productions, shown by the BBC in 1983.

; The Love Boat (S9 E22 as Slade 1986); Remington Steele; Murder, She Wrote; Babylon 5; The Feather and Father Gang; Newhart; MacGyver; Dear John; The Fall Guy; Maude; and Star Trek: The Next Generation.