Ian Gelder obituary
The actor Ian Gelder, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a notable supporting player at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End and in leading fringe theatres for decades before finding television fame as Kevan Lannister, brother of the feared patriarch Tywin (Charles Dance), who planned a Shakespearean power grab in Game of Thrones (2011-16). He also exercised the devious side of his acting personality as the villainous Mr Dekker in Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood, across five episodes in 2009.
Gelder could be louche and outrageous: as the leery-eyed Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane in a 1993 revival by Jeremy Sams, which featured his future life partner, Ben Daniels, as the object of his warped affections; or as a paunchy, leather-clad biker in a 1981 Birmingham Rep revival of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, bitching away with his partner, a drag queen played by Jim Hooper.
Mostly, though, his default modus operandi was that of a nuanced moral rectitude and deftly conveyed charm. Slightly built and gracefully appointed, he was as eminently watchable as he was unfailingly audible.
He could even make something substantial of an essentially boring character, notably so, twice, in the role of Titus Andronicus’s brother Marcus in Shakespeare’s goriest play – first with the RSC in 2003 (David Bradley as Titus); then at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014 (William Houston in the lead) – emanating a contradictory, moderating presence in a world of wild excess.
There was always something controlled and stealthy about his acting, always a joy to behold. He never spoke about it much, he just got on with the job. One of his most significant associations was with the mordant, brilliant playwright Peter Nichols, whose younger self in fictional disguise he played twice – in the beautiful, autobiographical family memoir Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), at the Greenwich theatre and the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue; and as the callow private Steven Flowers in the glorious Privates on Parade (1977), joining Denis Quilley, Joe Melia and Nigel Hawthorne in a military concert party in south-east Asia for the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych, where it ran for more than 200 performances.
The youngest child of Raymond White, an engineer and electronics buyer, and Clare (nee Gelder), an office manager for an antiques dealer, and a keen participant in amateur dramatics when the family moved to Wokingham, Berkshire, in the early 1960s, Ian took his mother’s maiden name on becoming an actor.
She involved the whole family in the activities of the Wokingham Players – Raymond did the lighting – and it soon became apparent that Ian had found his vocation. After attending Forest grammar school in nearby Winnersh, he won a place at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, where his contemporaries included Jeremy Irons, Tim Pigott-Smith and Christopher Biggins.
On graduating, he played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice on a British Council tour and, either side of Forget-Me-Not-Lane, performed in seasons at the Northcott in Exeter, the Young Vic in London and the RSC in Stratford (Silvius in As You Like It and Talbot in Terry Hands’ production of Henry VI, with Emrys James and Helen Mirren).
He was a regular in small roles on television from 1972, appearing as Prince Alfred in five episodes of Edward the Seventh (1975), starring Annette Crosbie and Timothy West; and as Rumpole of the Bailey’s son, Nick, a sociology professor in Miami described by his father (Leo McKern) as “the brains of the family”. Christine Edzard’s remarkable six-hour film of Little Dorrit (1987) was cast to the nines way down the list, from Derek Jacobi, Joan Greenwood and Alec Guinness to Robert Morley and Alan Bennett; Gelder was the Rev Samuel Barnacle.
In the mid-80s, he was a regular leading player with the lively Cambridge Theatre Company, then led by the director Bill Pryde, and played Lockwood, the storyteller in Wuthering Heights; the aristocratic fortune hunter, Archer, in George Farquhar’s great Restoration comedy The Beaux’ Stratagem; and multiple roles in the complete five-play cycle of George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, a futuristic fantasia once described by the biographer and critic Michael Holroyd as a masterpiece of wishful thinking.
Gelder was always a popular company member, not least in Nancy Meckler’s touring Shared Experience – as a frosty Karenin melting in deep wells of desire and pain in Anna Karenina (1997), and as a puzzled, anxious and finally bereft Fielding in A Passage to India (2003). Also with Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre (2004-05) – in David Hare’s Iraq war analysis, Stuff Happens (as Paul Wolfowitz); Hytner’s splendid production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, adapted by Nicholas Wright; and as a deft double of noble politician (“saucy” Worcester) and country bumpkin pot boy in the epic panoply of Henry IV, led by Michael Gambon’s Falstaff.
In a fine, meticulous revival of Arnold Wesker’s Roots by James Macdonald at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013, Gelder found ways of cutting straight through to our emotions as Beatie Bryant’s father, and for Michael Attenborough at the Almeida in the same year was a notably loyal and stoic Kent opposite Jonathan Pryce’s coiled and furious King Lear. Again, he made goodness compelling.
In 2015 he produced an electrifying performance at the Southwark Playhouse as the predatory British film-maker James Whale in Gods and Monsters (a more intense adaptation than even Ian McKellen’s major film breakthrough in 1998), frolicking with a bare-buttocked young gardener in Hollywood and superbly communicating, said Paul Taylor in the Independent, “the waspish, fastidious wit and the dread of mental disintegration” after a recent stroke.
There was more “remembrance of flings past” (David Jays in the Guardian) in Something in the Air (2022), a lyrical short play for two old men in a care home – Gelder was partnered by Christopher Godwin – written and co-directed by Peter Gill at the Jermyn Street theatre.
He and Ben entered into a civil partnership in 2008. For the last five years they lived in a cottage in East Sussex, with a lovingly cultivated garden.
He is survived by Ben and by his brother, Keith.
• Ian Gelder (Ian Denbigh White), actor, born 3 June 1949; died 6 May 2024
