The actor Jack Shepherd, who has died aged 85, was, in his own quiet and modest way, a Renaissance man who not only acted beautifully on stage and screen for 60 years, but also wrote a dozen plays, directed at Shakespeare’s Globe, painted in oils, played jazz piano and saxophone, and loved singing.
His innumerable credits are testament to a pathological creative energy, and he was drawn most energetically of all to the contemporary writing of Trevor Griffiths and the National Theatre company of the director Bill Bryden in the Peter Hall era of the 1970s.
