John Lamin Wood CBE (5 July 1930 – 6 August 2011) was an English actor, known for his performances in Shakespeare and his lasting association with Tom Stoppard.

Wood also appeared in WarGames, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ladyhawke, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Orlando, Shadowlands, The Madness of King George, Richard III, Sabrina, and Chocolat.

During the Mansfield College Gardens production of Twelfth Night he played the role of Malvolio alongside Maggie Smith starring as Viola.

Hobson described Wood's performance saying, "He had a sardonic, amused condescension and visible superiority complex", and the critic foresaw "a considerable future".

[1] Wood dismissively described these roles as "the cheapest way of getting a Shakespearean costume on stage", although Kenneth Tynan thought his Lennox to Paul Rogers' Macbeth "cut like a razor through the stubble of fustian".

Other roles included Bushy and Exton in Richard II, Sir Oliver Martext in As You Like It, Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor , and Helenus in Troilus and Cressida .

Wood made his West End debut as Don Quixote in Peter Hall's staging of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real (Phoenix, 1957).

Despairing of a successful career, he rejected several offers from Hall in the early 1960s to join the newly formed Royal Shakespeare Company, where he chose to appear on television in A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge, along with other production.

His last TV performances were in short plays written by Tom Stoppard for Thirty Minute Theatre: "Teeth" (February 1967) and "Another Moon Called Earth" (28 June 1967).

His performance as Richard Rowan, a self-tortured author with a need to be deceived by his wife, won the Bancroft Gold Medal award in 1970 for Most Promising Actor.

[1] At the RSC he also played Sir Fopling Flutter in George Etherege's Restoration comedy The Man of Mode, Mark in Jean Genet's The Balcony, and a narcissistic Saturninus in Titus Andronicus.

He made a "spindly, lecherous and slightly manic husband" in John Mortimer's Collaborators (Garrick, 1973) alongside Glenda Jackson.

As Carr, Wood alternated between the dual roles of a querulous geriatric and his younger snobbish self remembering his encounters with James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin in 1917 Zurich.

In 1977, he took the role of the lunatic Ivanov, who imagines he owns an orchestra, in Tom Stoppard and André Previn's political oratorio Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Royal Festival Hall.

Explaining his decision to take the part (a more commercial and contemporary venture than he was normally associated with), Wood told Newsweek, "I just wanted to get onstage in ordinary pants and do one-liners."

Wood returned to London as Richard III in a 1979 National Theatre production of the Shakespeare play, but his performance received mixed reviews.

The critic Irving Wardle said that Wood, "lit up the text like an electric storm, and simply had no rival as a source of nervous energy on a stage."

He also played Baron de Charlus in the 1997 radio adaptation of Harold Pinter's screenplay of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.