He appeared in three more Burton films: Sleepy Hollow, voicing Elder Gutknecht in Corpse Bride and the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland.

Gough also appeared in popular British television shows, including Doctor Who (as the villain in The Celestial Toymaker (1966) and as Councillor Hedin in Arc of Infinity (1983)), and in an episode of The Avengers as the automation-obsessed wheelchair user Dr. Armstrong in "The Cybernauts" (1965).

[2] At the National Theatre in London Gough excelled as a comedian, playing a resigned and rueful parent in Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce (1977).

[3][6] During World War II Gough was a conscientious objector, like his friend Frith Banbury, although he was obliged to serve in the Non-Combatant Corps,[7] a member of 6 Northern Company, in Liverpool.

In 1955, he portrayed one of the two murderers (the other was Michael Ripper) who kill the Duke of Clarence (John Gielgud), as well as the Princes in the Tower in Laurence Olivier's Richard III.

He also played the automation-obsessed wheelchair user Dr. Armstrong in "The Cybernauts", one of the best-remembered episodes of The Avengers (1965), returning the following season as the Russian spymaster Nutski in "The Correct Way to Kill".

He was introduced in the first-season episode "Maximum Security" of Colditz as Major "Willi" Schaeffer, the alcoholic second-in-command of the Kommandant (Bernard Hepton).

[15] He played Mikhel, a slippery assistant to a slain British spy opposite Alec Guinness in the television adaptation of John le Carré's Smiley's People the following year.

[16] Gough also appeared in The Citadel (1983) as Sir Jenner Halliday, in 1985's Out of Africa as Lord Delamere and as the fictional deposed KGB spymaster Andrei Zorin in Sleepers.

[25] Michael Keaton, who played the title character in the first two theatrical Batman films opposite Gough, paid tribute to him, describing him as sweet and charming, and wrote "To Mick – my butler, my confidant, my friend, my Alfred.

[28] Gough was nominated for a Drama Desk Award Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play in 1979 for Bedroom Farce and again in 1988 for Breaking the Code.