The actor and director Murray Melvin, who has died aged 90, had a rich and varied career in theatre, film and television, his outlook shaped by his experience in the late 1950s of working for Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. He was a pivotal member of her company, played crucial roles in A Taste of Honey, The Hostage and Oh What a Lovely War and passionately believed in passing on the legacy of her work to the next generation. In 1991 he also became the Theatre Royal’s archivist, and assembled a mass of invaluable material that in 2021 was donated to the British Library.
In a long career Melvin worked in many different media and invested everything he did with a physical precision he attributed to his early training in classical dance. In 1962 he won the best actor award at Cannes for his performance in Tony Richardson’s film of A Taste of Honey and went on to appear in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and beome a favourite actor of Ken Russell. His television career extended from being bumped off in the first episode of The Avengers (1961) to playing the sinister Bilis Manger in the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood (2007).
