TelevisionObituary

James Grout obituary

Stage and screen actor best known for his role as Chief Superintendent Strange in Inspector Morse

James Grout, who has died aged 84, was a supporting actor of authority and distinction best known on television for playing Inspector Morse's boss, Chief Superintendent Strange, as well as a gallery of prominent characters in other much-loved series. He was the flustered party whip in Yes Minister; a blunt-speaking judge, Ollie Oliphant, in John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey; and an affluent, slightly dodgy businessman, Mr McAllister, in Alan Plater's The Beiderbecke Affair.

Tall and increasingly rotund as he grew older, Grout had an immensely wide-ranging career on stage, radio and television for more than 50 years. He was renowned for having a great voice, noted by the critic Harold Hobson in 1950 when, as a graduating Rada student, Grout recited from Don Marquis's The Dark Hours – words, said Hobson, that "seemed to surpass all human beauty; the whole theatre must have felt his voice in its splendid compassion for, and elevation above, the sorrows of mankind".

Grout could surprise an audience physically, too, and step up into a higher gear: as the outrageously flamboyant actor Harry Chitterlow in the musical Half a Sixpence, starring Tommy Steele, and for which Grout was nominated for a Tony award on Broadway in 1965; or as Tennessee Williams's ranting southern mogul Boss Finley in Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Lauren Bacall, at the Haymarket in the West End in 1985.

Grout was born in London, the second son of William and Beatrice Anne. His father, who owned and managed a chain of shoe shops, died in the second world war in service as a special policeman. Grout's aptitude for the stage was nurtured by an English teacher at Trinity County grammar school in Wood Green, north London, who, Grout said, realised he was a show-off and gave him all the best bits to read out in class: "My voice would fill the school."

He won a scholarship to Rada, his time there punctuated by national service with the RAF in Wiltshire, where he trained as a radar mechanic but concentrated on amateur theatricals in one of the aircraft hangars. He and his colleagues toured other service camps with a diet of short plays and comedy sketches.

In 1950, the Hobson notice propelled him into the Old Vic, where he made his debut as Valentine in Twelfth Night, moving on to Stratford-upon-Avon for three seasons. He was rapidly becoming a supporting player of substance. In 1960, he joined the cast of The Mousetrap before playing four upright citizens in Lindsay Anderson's production of The Lily White Boys, a satirical musical by Harry Cookson and Christopher Logue, at the Royal Court; the cast included Albert Finney, Shirley Ann Field and Georgia Brown.

That decade, he worked with his future Morse mucker, John Thaw, who became a close friend, in Redcap, a TV series about the military police in which he prophetically played Thaw's boss. It was Half a Sixpence that defined his profile in the business, leading to a series of major West End roles in plays by David Mercer, Michael Frayn, William Douglas Home and Simon Gray; he was outstanding as a balloon-waisted humanist, Henry Windscape, in Gray's Quartermaine's Terms (1981), a Chekhovian comedy of dashed hopes and quiet desperation in a Cambridge language school in the early 1960s, playing alongside Edward Fox and Prunella Scales in Harold Pinter's production.

He virtually took up residence at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in the early 1980s, playing opposite Peter O'Toole in Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman; supporting Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright as Sir Wilful Witwoud in William Gaskill's definitive revival of William Congreve's The Way of the World; and as Boss Finley.

In 1986 he graced Ronald Eyre's perfect production of JB Priestley's silver-wedding fracas, When We Are Married, at the newly refurbished art deco Whitehall theatre (since transformed into the Trafalgar Studios). Grout was at his huffing, puffing best as Alderman Helliwell in a handpicked cast including Elizabeth Spriggs, Scales, Timothy West and Bill Fraser.

On BBC radio, Grout figured in two of the best long-running comedy series of recent times. First, in 1985, he was a practical and battle-scarred headteacher in Jim Eldridge's King Street Junior (Grout's elder brother, Richard, who predeceased him, was for many years the head of a primary school in Highgate, north London). Then, for the latter half of the 1990s, he was a well-meaning atheist, Professor Richard Whittingham, in Andy Hamilton's satanic satire Old Harry's Game.

He was turning, perhaps, from an authority figure into a jolly old cove, but a brief sojourn at Richard Eyre's National Theatre in the mid-1990s – as a pin-striped suit in Charles MacArthur's Johnny On a Spot, and the dependable Talbot in Schiller's Mary Stuart (with Anna Massey and Isabelle Huppert) – proved he was still capable of pulling his increasing weight. On television in the 90s, he cropped up as Mr Spenlow (so stiff, as Dickens said, that he could hardly bend himself) in David Copperfield and as a lovely, autumnal Justice Silence in Henry IV, directed by John Caird. You were always glad to see him. He now combined qualities of familiarity with total relaxation as an actor.

In 1977, he and his wife, Noreen, a schooldays sweetheart, moved on a whim from west London to Malmesbury, Wiltshire, where he contributed a charming column to the local paper.

Noreen survives him.

James David Grout, actor, born 22 October 1927; died 24 June 2012

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