Peter Bayliss

Anarchic actor of genuinely theatrical energy

With his mobile features (eyes that could flash balefully or boggle in amazement and a mouth which could switch from lubricious leer to beamish grin), with his rich voice and musical gifts, Peter Bayliss was rarely out of work over a long career of remarkable variety, from Fringe theatre to Broadway, from My Fair Lady to The Rocky Horror Show.

Some directors could find Bayliss, always ready with ideas and invention, altogether too much of a handful, but he worked with some of the most respected of his times – John Gielgud, Tyrone Guthrie, George Devine and Yukio Ninagawa among them – and in his later years he was a regular for Jonathan Miller at both the Old Vic and the Almeida.

Bayliss was the classic stage-struck child, trained and educated at London's Italia Conti School, although he always claimed that his higher and real education was with Gielgud in his Haymarket season of 1944. With a wartime company, it was not possible for Gielgud to match the innovations of his New and Queen's Theatre pre-war ensemble triumphs, but even small parts and understudying the Ghost in Gielgud's final Hamlet (this time directed by Dadie Rylands) proved an inspiring professional baptism for Bayliss.

Similar work – a two-line butler's role and understudying Clive Brook in Wilde's Woman of No Importance (Savoy, 1953) and the small part of Crassus and understudying Noël Coward, who frustratingly refused to be "off", even with chronic lumbago, in a glittering H.M. Tennent production for Coronation year of Shaw's The Apple Cart (Haymarket, 1953) – saw him gradually attract notice. A major break came when "Binkie" Beaumont of the Tennent empire arranged for him to audition for Guthrie's production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker (Haymarket, 1954) starring Broadway's Ruth Gordon. Guthrie, who loved resourceful players in supporting roles – he tended to spend more time on them than on the stars – cast him in the minor but telling role of The Coachman, and his success in the show took him with it to Broadway (Royale, 1955).

Several later West End productions saw Bayliss back at the Haymarket in Rattigan's Lawrence of Arabia play Ross (1960) with Alec Guinness and then giving a powerful performance for the American director Harold Clurman in Giraudoux' short-lived Judith (Her Majesty's, 1962) with Sean Connery. In less commercial ventures, he effortlessly commanded the stage in a brave Galileo (Mermaid, 1963) as the Pope, and he provided some welcome spectral glee as the Guard in the otherwise rumly glum Exit the King (Royal Court, 1963) by Ionesco, again with Guinness.

Bayliss was something of a Mermaid regular in the early 1960s. He hopped into Bernard Miles's wooden leg (and was nastily pecked by the foul-tempered Miles parrot) for a Long John Silver full of gusto in Treasure Island (1963) and later at Puddle Dock he sparkled in three contrasted parts in the Shavian triple-bill of Trifles and Tomfooleries (1967).

An even more memorable display of Bayliss's versatility was a highlight of Roger Milner's How's the World Treating You? (Hampstead and Wyndham's, 1964) in which he again played several roles, opposite an equally protean and hilarious Patricia Routledge. They also had success with this on Broadway (Music Box, 1966).

His first significant Shakespeare role was Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Regent's Park, 1968) – a glorious piece of braggadocio – which he followed with a classic Broadway flop (stories of which he dined out on for some time) in a misbegotten Galton and Simpson version of René d'Obaldia with Rockefeller and the Red Indians (Booth, 1968) opposite a bemusedly miscast Frankie Howerd.

Bayliss returned to another disaster (and more anecdotes) – the notorious posthumous premiere of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw (Queen's, 1969) in which he was the confused Sergeant Match, stripped and fetchingly attired in a skin-tight leopardskin frock by the close. A hapless, misconceived production and a floundering Sir Ralph Richardson sank this rapidly, although Bayliss managed to enliven the later scenes.

The material was inferior, but at least he could enjoy the security of one of the West End's longest runs in the froth of The Man Most Likely To . . . (Vaudeville, 1969) before another memorable flop, the bizarre allegorical "comedy" Council of Love (Criterion, 1970) with a cast-list including Satan, the Virgin Mary and Syphilis. Bayliss, much to his delight, was cast as God, and played Him, unforgettably, as a cross between Sir Edward Heath and Max Wall.

The Young Vic during a golden period was a natural home for Bayliss's exuberant personality; he was Geronte, rivalling Miles Malleson for blustering chin-acting, in Frank Dunlop's joyous re-invention of Molière in Scapino (1972) with Jim Dale and a strong Hobson in Hobson's Choice (1973), surprisingly and effectively vengeful in the third act. Then, back in the West End, he found a telling vein of pathos in Ernest, the eternal outsider of Coward's Design for Living (Phoenix, 1974), boggling like an outraged bullfrog at the "erotic, three-sided hodge-podge" of the Bohemian trio (Vanessa Redgrave, Daniel Massey and John Stride).

Jonathan Miller cast Bayliss for the first time in his starry Three Sisters (Cambridge, 1976) in which he was startlingly unsettling as a seriously disturbed Solyony. And then two major musicals confirmed his ability in the field, following previous shows such as Stratford East's Nickleby and Me (1975) with his memorable doubling of an hilariously vainglorious Crummles and a monstrous Squeers. In the Cameron Mackintosh revival of My Fair Lady (Adelphi, 1979) he stopped the show in Gillian Lynne's rousing staging of Doolittle's two big numbers, but he also brought an impressively hard-edged Shavian zest to the book-scenes. And in another Mackintosh revival, an unfortunately vulgar and brassy The Boy Friend (Albery, 1983), he stole the show as a pantingly rantipole Lord Brockhurst, jowls a-quiver as he Charlestoned through "It's Never Too Late to Fall in Love".

Bayliss gave one of his very finest performances – again for Miller – as a heartbreakingly broken-down fool opposite Eric Porter in King Lear (Old Vic, 1989). And as the old actor-laddie, Telfer, facing a changing theatre, in an awkward, undercast Trelawny of the "Wells" revival (Comedy, 1993), he and another veteran, Michael Hordern, gave object lessons in style.

Peter Barnes and Bayliss made another good match. He played in Barnes's Feydeau adaptations opposite Leonard Rossiter (he and Bayliss made formidable partners) in Frontiers of Farce (Criterion, 1977) and as Justice Overdo in Barnes's version of Bartholomew Fair (Roundhouse, 1978) he was magnificently overripe. More recently he worked on three new Barnes plays at the National Theatre Studio (1996).

Jonathan Miller's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Almeida, 1996), somewhat oddly set in what seemed to be a sectional greenhouse but ravishingly costumed, for some short-changed the fun of the Mechanicals. Bayliss's Bottom was certainly more muted than his first, but his scenes with Angela Thorne's Diana Cooper-like Titania were both funny and teasingly erotic, and his "Dream" speech touchingly moonstruck.

His last Shakespeare role – his final significant stage appearance – was in a West End Macbeth (Queen's, 1999). A less than coherent production, Bayliss as the Porter was the best thing in it – filthy (in every sense), raucous, splenetic and charged with a genuinely theatrical energy missing elsewhere.

Television used Bayliss widely, most memorably in several Dickens adaptations, including a dazzling turn as the scoundrelly Montague Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit and Mr Sleary in a revelatory Hard Times. He was also remarkably effective as a gentle Edward Lear in The Amazing Mr Lear, and at his most seedily splendid – once more for Jonathan Miller – in an unusual but successful The Beggar's Opera with The Who's Roger Daltrey as Macheath.

On film he was lucky to work with the Archers – Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – early in his career, with small parts in The Red Shots (1947) and A Canterbury Tale (1944). Powell admired Bayliss's work and also cast him when he made a rare and unsuccessful excursion into the theatre with a good role in the British premiere of Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column (tour, 1950) which never reached the West End.

Later he had a pungent cameo as Lord Grant in Schlesinger's Darling (1965) and, although the movie version of Coward's story Pretty Polly Barlow (1968) was routine stuff, it was much enlivened by supporting performances from Patricia Routledge and from Bayliss as a snooty cruise-liner purser.

Bayliss enjoyed the unpredictable variety of his career. If he had a regret, it was that he was not offered more classical work, Shakespeare in particular. And indeed his Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, for instance, would have been quite something. But then, such was his versatility, he would have been equally at home in the same plays as Pandarus.

Alan Strachan

Peter Bayliss was a singular man, and actor, writes Jasper Britton. As a child his ambition was to be an astronaut, and he retained a lifetime fascination with the Universe, physically, mentally and spiritually.

He was fascinated by gurus such as Krishnamurti and Timothy Leary. He is believed to have been brought up in the Catholic Church, but was nearer to Buddhism in practice. Little if anything is known of his parents and childhood. All he would ever tell me of his mother and father was that he last saw them when they left him at a gentlemen's public convenience in Ware, when he was eight years old.

His onstage persona, in whatever role he played, was greatly informed by his own lovable, anarchic and eccentric self. I first met him in 1979 in Leicester, where Cameron Mackintosh's My Fair Lady was first produced. My father, Tony Britton, was playing Higgins. I was a teenager deep in angst. Peter appeared at my Holiday Inn room door on my birthday with Ian Dury's New Boots and Panties on cassette.

Peter was always young at heart. Throughout his sixties he was a frequent clubber at Heaven, and even in his seventies he retained an appetite for loud dance music, playing it so loud he couldn't or wouldn't hear the phone when it rang. His Jermyn Street flat was stacked with powerful hi-fi equipment, neon lighting, video recorders, televisions, the latest computers. All of which, at times, were sources of endless and hilarious frustration to him.

His answerphone messages became legendary among my schoolfriends. We would phone his number to record them, and built quite a collection. They invariably involved Peter's butler, Father Christmas and Uncle Holly, Sonny Tufts, corgis going round the Grand National course (twice!) and Peter ("his Grace") being in the "West Wing at the moment". Sometimes there was just the poem

Our maid, Sarah-Jane, fly-by-night,

Left the dishes shining white,

Left her stockings on the horse

Down the heel with stitches coursed,

Dropped a message in a tree;

This is what the message said,

"When you get this, I'll be dead."

As Doolittle he was the most mischievous actor I have ever seen. A very great number of off-script excursions were made, and usually to reduce my father to hysterics. Offstage he was a dab hand at conjuring tricks, making coins and cards disappear/reappear at will. He was a prodigious photographer; somewhere there must be thousands of photographs made into first-night cards, doctored by hand or with computer assistance, and captioned bizarrely.

He went to the theatre or cinema almost every night, having pored over the Time Out listings, and often plumped for the most way-out fringe shows. He loved dinners at Kettners, and drank port and brandy for his booming, rumbling voice. One of his greatest delights was to make people laugh at the other end of the phone, for hours. When he couldn't do that, he'd say that he'd do half an hour with the fridge door open, bathed in its light for the benefit of its contents.

Peter Bayliss, actor: born Kingston upon Thames, Surrey 27 June 1922; died London 29 July 2002.