[6] In a production of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, he played a lunatic called Troubadour and a woman who sells pigs.

[5]After Oxford, he spent two years training for an acting career at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where he was taught (amongst others) by Michael MacOwan and Vivian Matalon and where his contemporaries included Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi.

His parts at Salisbury included the Dauphin in Saint Joan, Disraeli in Portrait of a Queen, Trinculo in The Tempest, and "all the Shakespeare".

[5] His first West End part came in May 1965 in Julian Mitchell's dramatisation of A Heritage and Its History at the Phoenix, in which he got good notices, and his next was in a Beaumont production of Peter Ustinov's Half-Way up the Tree, directed by Sir John Gielgud.

(1980), both produced by David Croft, Bertie Wooster in Thank You, P. G. Wodehouse (1981), Ricotin in Federico Fellini's And the Ship Sails On (1983), and Captain Hastings (to Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot) in Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Dead Man's Folly and Murder in Three Acts (both 1986).

In one piece he noted Handsome young male actors of the older school have tended, in my experience, to be somewhat vapid and vain.

He met the actress Vivien Heilbron when both were studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and they were married in 1963.