The actor and writer Gawn Grainger, who has died aged 87, had an extraordinary career that spanned more than 70 years. Even if rarely the star, he had the resilience and versatility of the born character actor and was the product of a now vanished regional repertory system. Above all, he was an indispensable team player and a pillar, along with Michael Bryant, of the National Theatre.
He began his career there under Laurence Olivier in 1972 when the company was situated at the Old Vic and worked under successive directors before making his final appearance in 2017 during the tenure of Rufus Norris. He worked regularly in the West End and in TV and in the 1980s sidelined his acting career to focus on writing scripts for the small screen. He soon returned to the stage, however, which was his natural habitat.
As an actor he had a powerful physical presence, a superb voice and the consummate adaptabilityimparted by rep training. Off-stage, he also had an instinctive charm that made people like and trust him.
During his early years at the National, he not only came under Olivier’s wing, but became a lifelong friend of the actor, whom he regarded as a surrogate father, and his family: he eventually went on to ghost-write Olivier’s book On Acting (1986), and, along with Maggie Smith, was present at the great man’s deathbed.
Having temporarily abandoned acting, Grainger was persuaded to return by Harold Pinter to appear in two plays of his at the Almeida theatre, and was rewarded with Pinter’s eternal friendship. His ability to relate to people extended even to critics. He and his wife, Zoë Wanamaker, were passionate theatregoers and whenever I ran into Grainger at first nights he would want to exchange opinions about whatever we had recently seen.
What he did have in common with many actors was a slightly ramshackle upbringing. He spoke openly about the fact that he was the result of an affair between his Scottish mother, Elizabeth (nee Gall), married at the time to another man, and a lodger, Charles Grainger. Although his parents went on to marry, his mother felt obliged to leave puritanical Glasgow, where her son was born, to live in London. At the start of the second world war, the young Gawn was evacuated to Northern Ireland.
Returning to the capital, he got a scholarship to Westminster City school but soon found himself drawn to public performance. As a boy scout, he took part in the Ralph Reader gang-shows. But it was a sign of his self-confidence that, as a 12-year-old, having read that Ivor Novello needed an actor to play the boy-monarch in his West End musical King’s Rhapsody, he turned up at the stage-door, feigned a non-existent appointment with Novello and immediately got the job.
After that an acting career was inevitable and in the early 60s he benefited from a still flourishing regional repertory system. He started in weekly rep at Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, playing opposite an equally young Vanessa Redgrave, graduated to fortnightly rep at Ipswich, where Ian McKellen was in the company, and finally moved in 1964 to Bristol Old Vic where the productions changed every three weeks.
There he played a succession of leading parts, including the title roles in Sartre’s Kean and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, and was Romeo to Jane Asher’s Juliet. It is a sign of Bristol’s prestige that Romeo and Juliet was one of three of its productions chosen to go on a world tour, winding up in New York in 1967. That led to Grainger spending a year on Broadway in There’s a Girl in My Soup and, in another testament to his versatility, becoming a regular on an American version of the TV panel-game What’s My Line?
Back in London, Grainger found a new stability by marrying the actor Janet Key (his first, brief, marriage had ended in divorce) and when he joined Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1972 it was as if he had found his destiny: he loved the company and the company loved him.
His debut was in Michael Blakemore’s dazzling production of The Front Page and he went on to appear in Macbeth, The Misanthrope, The Bacchae and Trevor Griffiths’ The Party – in which Olivier made his last National appearance – before playing the lead in Jonathan Miller’s production of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro. I described him as “eagle-eyed but humanly vulnerable”.
Grainger was one of the few actors to make the transition from Olivier’s National to that of his successor, Peter Hall. It is also a sign of Grainger’s status and dependability that, in his Diaries, Hall records frequently turning to him to gauge the company’s mood during periods of industrial strife.
While loyal to Hall, Grainger was a key member of the Bill Bryden company that created its own distinctive style and aesthetic under the umbrella of the National Theatre. The Bryden approach was based on team-work, vocal prowess and uninhibited physicality, and Grainger, who appeared in productions of Tony Harrison’s The Passion, O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home and The Iceman Cometh, and Lark Rise and Candleford, among many others, was perfectly suited to the gutsy ensemble ethos.
In the 1980s, however, Grainger decided to devote himself to writing. His first stage play, Four to One, had already been performed at the Young Vic in 1976 and been well received. Set in the back-room of an Islington pub during a game of pool, it suggested an adroit mix of Robert Ardrey and Pinter, in that it combined territorial possessiveness with hostility to intruders.
A handful of stage-plays followed, including Jubilee, starring Peggy Mount, but in the 80s Grainger worked mainly for TV and radio. There were single plays such as Clowns, produced by Bryden for BBC One, long-running series including The Big Deal, with Ray Brooks, and Trainer, the horse-racing drama.
It was a fruitful period, but in 1991 Grainger was invited by Pinter to appear at the Almeida in London, in productions of Party Time and Mountain Language, which later led to performing alongside Pinter himself in No Man’s Land. David Leveaux’s production of the latter reminded us that the play is a string quartet and that the servants, superbly played by Grainger and Douglas Hodge, are just as important as Hirst and Spooner, played by Pinter and Paul Eddington.
Grainger remembered that Pinter loved the camaraderie and back-chat of the dressing-room. One night Grainger said to Pinter “Here you are in this tatty dressing-room in Islington – one of the great writers of the 20th century.” Pinter replied, with mock-fierceness – “What do you mean, one of?”
This period of renewal for Grainger was shattered by the death of his wife, Janet, in 1992, but in 1994 he married Wanamaker, to whom he was deeply devoted.
Over the next three decades he rediscovered his appetite for acting and did a massive variety of work: West End plays including Amy’s View, Don Juan in Soho and The Entertainer, where he caught perfectly the grumbling disillusion of the aged Billy Rice; numerous shows at the Donmar and the Young Vic, including a touching performance as the aged Firs in Katie Mitchell’s production of The Cherry Orchard; and, inevitably, a return to his spiritual home at the National Theatre, where he was a bullish publican in Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, a sprightly elder in Really Old Like Forty-Five and the vigorous father of the hero’s champion in Saint George and the Dragon.
In his later years he had problems with macular degeneration, but he remained, whenever I met him, invincibly cheerful and left behind imperishable memories: of an engaging raconteur, a fine writer and the kind of dedicated ensemble actor who is the backbone of British theatre.
He is survived by Zoë and two children, Charlie and Eliza, from his second marriage.
