Ronald Pickup, Shakespearean actor who went on to find fame on the big and small screen – obituary

Ronald Pickup, who has died aged 80, emerged as a young National Theatre star in the 1960s and appeared in several leading Shakespearean roles before moving successfully into film and television, most recently in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015).

Tall and slim, with a long, sensitive face at once familiar or possibly not, Pickup possessed chameleon-like qualities which, as one critic noted, seemed to depend less on painted surfaces than on inner change.

Perhaps his most memorable television role was in Melvyn Bragg’s A Time To Dance (BBC, 1992) when he was cast as an amorous, middle-aged Cumbrian bank manager called Andrew Powell who has a torrid affair with a sultry 18-year-old played by Dervla Kirwan. When a rape scene occurred within the first few minutes, nearly 40 viewers complained to the Broadcasting Standards Council.

Even so, Richard Last in the Telegraph commended the performances of Pickup and Kirwan. “I can’t imagine any other duo capable of making the sordid story of Andrew’s ‘erotic obsession’ more plausible,” he insisted.

Among Pickup’s other notable television appearances was that of Guiseppe Verdi in Renato Castellani’s The Life of Verdi (RAI, 1983), a superb portrayal of the Italian composer acclaimed by the New York Times, which noted that the lavish six-part epic called for 100 actors, 18,000 extras and 4,000 costumes.

In Fortunes of War (BBC, 1988), acclaimed in The Sunday Telegraph as “by far the outstanding BBC drama of the year”, he brought a “wonderfully shabby nobility” to his role as the appalling Prince Yakimov, a Russo-Irish scavenger and incorrigible drunk.

His earlier television appearances included The Tempest (BBC Play of the Month, May 1968), in which The Daily Telegraph admired his “remarkably fine Ariel” opposite Sir Michael Redgrave as Prospero, Pickup speaking his lines “with a lively and poetic clarity, alight with mischief and intelligence”.

On the big screen, another memorable historical role was that of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the wartime drama Darkest Hour (2017), with Gary Oldman as Churchill.

As a young actor starting out at the National, Pickup was one of Laurence Olivier’s brightest talents during his Old Vic era. “Every young actor in the country wanted to be there,” explained Olivier’s wife Joan Plowright. Most joined at the humblest level, walking-on and understudying. Pickup’s name recurred in the lower lines of cast lists among “courtiers, soldiers, servants etc” in Hamlet, Othello or Congreve’s Love For Love, along with those of Anthony Hopkins, Jane Lapotaire and Michael York, among others.

Pickup’s films included Day of the Jackal (1972), the Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983), The Mission (1985) and Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1996). At the age of 71 he played the ladies’ man Norman in the charming comedy drama The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), which proved to be a surprise box-office smash in cinemas. He subsequently reprised the role in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 2015.

Ronald Alfred Pickup was born on June 7 1940 in Chester, where he was educated at the King’s School. After graduating in English from Leeds University he attended Rada, and in 1964 was one of 21 senior students chosen to tour Shakespeare in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s birth. Pickup took the title tole in Macbeth and was Adam in As You Like It. He made his first television appearance, as a physician in Doctor Who, the same year.

On his return from America he briefly worked in repertory in Leicester before moving to the Royal Court (1964-66) where, taking the title role in Ann Jellicoe’s Shelley (1965), he impressed as the fragile young poet, Alan Brien in The Sunday Telegraph remarking on Pickup’s “long-necked, yearning look of a beautiful, bewildered snail that we see in Shelley’s portraits”.

From there he moved to the National Theatre, where he made an early appearance as Rosalind in an all-male As You Like It (Old Vic, 1967). Much trumpeted in advance, the production’s four female roles were played, as one critic noted, with varying degrees of womanliness, but Pickup’s Rosalind, willowy and breastless, with “darkly widened eyes and a generously pinked mouth”, was judged the one of the four “most clinically drained of sensuality”.

In his notice, the Telegraph’s man in the stalls, the veteran WA Darlington, congratulated Pickup on “the tact and delicacy” with which he presented Shakespeare’s enchanting heroine, even if, at times, he overdid the “mincing walk” which goes with long skirts.

Pickup, almost exactly John Lennon’s age, played the Beatle in a stage adaptation of In His Own Write (Old Vic, 1968) and appeared alongside Olivier, Alan Bates and Derek Jacobi in a film version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1970) and on stage, again with Olivier, as his sickly son Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1971).

Both also appeared in a subsequent television adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s masterwork (ITV, 1973). The following year Pickup returned to the small screen opposite Lee Remick as her dominating husband Lord Randolph Churchill in the ITV mini-series Jennie.

His later stage roles included that of Lucky opposite Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 2010) and as Ellie’s father alongside Sir Derek Jacobi in Shaw’s Heartbreak House (Chichester, 2012).

On television in the early 1980s Pickup played the author of 1984 in Orwell on Jura, Nietzsche in Tony Palmer’s Wagner, appeared in the same director’s Puccini, and was Julius Winterhalter in the television movie Waters Of The Moon. He starred opposite Judi Dench in Channel 4’s drama series Behaving Badly (1989), and appeared with her the same year, this time on stage, as Gayev to her Madame Ranyevskaya, in Sam Mendes’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (Aldwych).

More recently on television he was Sir Michael Reresby in the sixth series of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2015) and Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiating at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown (Netflix, 2016).

On radio in 1986 Pickup starred as Tchaikovsky in Derek Kartun’s play The Missing Day (Radio 4), portraying the Russian composer’s suicide from arsenical poisoning after being “outed” as gay. He was cast as Hector opposite Paul Scofield in Andrew Rissik’s King Priam (Radio 4, 1987) and starred as Montezuma in The Golden Years (Radio 3, also 1987), Arthur Miller’s long-lost play discovered by Christopher Bigsby in the library at the University of Texas.

In 2012 he was awarded an honorary DLitt by the University of Chester.

With his American wife Lans Traverse, whom he married in 1964, he had a son, Simon, and a daughter, Rachel, who became an actress.

Ronald Pickup, born June 7 1940, died February 24 2021