He was taken on by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in his teens, and after a break for compulsory military service he began a West End career in 1950, succeeding Richard Burton in The Lady's Not For Burning.

In the 1990s Quilley returned to the National Theatre company, playing a wide range of parts, from Shakespearean comedy to Jacobean revenge tragedy, Victorian classics and his final role, a bibulous millionaire in the musical Anything Goes.

[2] Later in 1950 Quilley joined the Old Vic Company for a British Council tour of Italy, playing Fabian in Twelfth Night and Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice.

In The Manchester Guardian, Philip Hope-Wallace wrote, "Denis Quilley turns out a comparatively rare figure nowadays: a presentable singing English hero, a most likeable performance.

[9] Quilley made no cinema films in the 1950s, but appeared in several television productions, ranging from Shakespeare (Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, 1955)[10] to detective fiction (Jimmy Sutane in Dancers in Mourning (1959).

[11] After playing in short runs of non-musical productions Quilley returned to a singing role in 1960, when he took over from Keith Michell as Nestor-le-Fripe in Irma la Douce.

[14] In 1965, Quilley appeared in the science-fiction TV series Undermind playing Professor Val Randolph - a scientist who after four episodes is revealed to be an alien traitor.

[10] In the later 1960s he worked extensively in Australia; he toured with June Bronhill in the musical Robert and Elizabeth,[15] and became known for his role as Customs Inspector Ted Hallam in ABC Television's drama series, Contrabandits.

[3] When Peter Hall succeeded Olivier in 1975, Quilley was the only member of the old company to be invited to appear in the opening production of the new regime, playing Caliban to Gielgud's Prospero in The Tempest.

[5] Quilley returned to musicals in 1980, playing the title role in the first London production of Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

[18] Later that year he was in a BBC Mini-series Murder of a Moderate Man[19] and a West End thriller, Fatal Attraction, before returning to musical theatre, in La Cage aux Folles in 1986.

In The Guardian Michael Billington wrote that Quilley made his character "dapper, ebullient and tender: he persuades you he might have both sired a son and loved a man.

Billington commented that Quilley "conveys Pizzaro's journey from tough, hard brutal commander to enraptured idolater and, finally, grieving lover: he is at once indisputably masculine and a figure skittishly enlivened by his rival's physical presence.

"[21] During the 1980s Quilley continued to appear in numerous television broadcasts, playing parts like Parris in The Crucible, W. E. Gladstone in Number 10, Captain Waterhouse in Tales Of The Unexpected, Peter in a biblical mini-series A.D. (1985) and Dr. Leon Sterndale in the 1988 Sherlock Holmes adaptation of The Devil's Foot.

[10] His cinema roles in the 1980s were Kenneth Marshall in Evil under the Sun (1982), Captain Dennis in the film of Privates on Parade (1982), Rejeb in Memed My Hawk (1984), the prophet Samuel in King David (1985), and the Prime Minister in Foreign Body (1986).