by Actor Ian Gelder, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a prominent supporting player at the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End and in fringe theaters for years before achieving fame. on TV as Kevan Lannister, brother of the Guild. fear of the patriarch Tywin (Charles Dance), who planned Shakespeare’s power grab in Game of Thrones (2011-16). He also exercised the devious side of his acting personality as the villainous Mr. Dekker in Torchwood, Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who spin-off, over five episodes in 2009.
Gelder could be louche and treacherous: as the leery-eyed Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane in the 1993 revival with Jeremy Sams, who portrayed his future life partner, Ben Daniels, as the object of his warped affection; or as a paunchy, leather-clad biker in the Birmingham Rep revival of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, eloping with Jim Hooper’s drag queen partner.
For the most part, though, his default modus operandi was modern moral rectitude and cleverly conveyed magic. Slightly built and elegantly designed, it was as visible as it was unfailingly audible.
He could even make something substantial out of a boring basic character, especially so, twice, in the role of Marcus, brother of Titus Andronicus, in Shakespeare’s brightest play – first with the RSC in 2003 (David Bradley as Titus) ; then at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014 (William Houston in the lead) – evoking a contradictory, moderate presence in a world of wild excess.
There was always something controlled and stealthy about his acting, always a joy to behold. He didn’t talk much about it, he got on with the job. One of his most notable relationships was with the brilliant, mordant playwright Peter Nichols, whom he twice disguised himself as a younger man – in the beautiful autobiographical family memoir Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971). , in the Greenwich theater and theatre. Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue; and as the noisy 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 had run for more than 200 performances.
He was the youngest child of Raymond White, an electronics engineer and buyer, and Clare (née Gelder), an antiques dealer’s office manager, and keen participant in amateur plays when the family moved to Wokingham, Berkshire, in the early 1960s. Ian. he took his mother’s maiden name on becoming an actor.
She was involved with the whole family in the activities of the Wokingham Players – Raymond did the lighting – and it was soon clear that Ian had found his career. After attending Forest grammar school in nearby Winnersh, he won a place at the Bristol Old Vic theater school, where Jeremy Irons, Tim Pigott-Smith and Christopher Biggins were among his classmates.
After graduating, he played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice on a British Council tour and, on both sides of Forget-Me-Not-Lane, he performed in seasons at the Northcott in Exeter, the Young Vic in London and the RSC in Stratford (Silvius in the production of As You Like It and Talbot in Terry Hands 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 the Bailey’s Rumpole son Nick, a Miami sociology professor described by his father (Leo McKern) as “the brains of the family”. Christine Edzard’s remarkable six-hour film Little Dorrit (1987) was cast in the nine in 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 principal player with the lively Cambridge Theater Company, then under the direction of director Bill Pryde, and was Lockwood, the narrator in Wuthering Heights; the noble 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 described by biographer and critic Michael Holroyd as a masterpiece of wishful thinking.
Gelder has always been popular with the company, especially on Nancy Meckler’s tour of Shared Experience – as a frozen Karenin melting into deep wells of desire and pain in Anna Karenina (1997), and as a deeply troubled , anxious and finally overwhelmed by Fielding in A Passage to India (2003). Also with the National Theater Nicholas Hytner (2004-05) – in David Hare’s analysis of the Iraq war, Stuff Happens (as Paul Wolfowitz); Hytner’s brilliant production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, adapted by Nicholas Wright; and as one of the noble politicians (“saucy” Worcester) and as a country potter’s boy in the epic panoply of Henry IV, led by Michael Gambon’s Falstaff.
In a brilliantly comic revival of Arnold Wesker’s Roots by James Macdonald at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013, Gelder found ways to engage our emotions as Beatie Bryant’s father, and for Michael Attenborough at the Almeida in the same year he was extremely faithful . and stock Kent before Jonathan Pryce’s angry and mad King Lear. Again, he did strong good.
In 2015 he gave an electrifying performance at the Southwark Playhouse as the British predatory filmmaker James Whale in Gods and Monsters (a tougher adaptation than even Ian McKellen’s 1998 blockbuster), frolicking with a bare-buttocked young gardener in Hollywood. brilliantly communicating, said Paul Taylor in the Independent, “the brooding, reckless wit and dread of mental disintegration” after a recent stroke.
Something in the Air (2022), a short lyrical drama about two old men in a care home – Gelder partnered with Christopher Godwin – written and co-directed with Peter was more “reminiscence of flings past” (David Jays in the Guardian) Gill at the Jermyn Street theatre.
He and Ben entered into a civil partnership in 2008. For the past five years they lived in a cottage in East Sussex, with a lovingly cultivated garden.
He is survived by Ben and his brother Keith.
• Ian Gelder (Ian Denbigh White), actor, born 3 June 1949; died 6 May 2024
