Bernard Kay, who has died aged 86, was a versatile and intelligent actor. He brought gravitas and often – despite his imposing frame – vulnerability to more than 100 roles in popular television drama during the course of a 60-year career.

He was born in Bolton, Lancashire. His father, Billy, was a reporter on the Yorkshire Post who spent his final years in an asylum and died when Bernard was 12. His mother, Edith, also died when he was an infant, apparently having taken her own life. His care was shared between his grandparents and the strict regime at Chetham’s school, now Chetham’s school of music, Manchester, where, as he put it: “I had Christianity beaten into me.”

Shortly before the end of the second world war he became a cub reporter at the Bolton Evening News and also contributed to the Manchester Guardian. He decided that journalism was not for him when he witnessed a colleague breaking into the house of a dead serviceman and stealing a photograph while his grieving father spoke to reporters outside.

He left journalism to do national service in 1946 and then attended the Old Vic theatre school in London. His film debut came in Carry on Sergeant (1958), but he subsequently worked mostly on television until Robert Bolt wrote the part of the Bolshevik in David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965) with him in mind. It remained his most important film performance despite strong character parts in They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), Pierrepoint (2005) and Psychosis (2010).

He felt his strengths lay on the smaller screen and many leading television directors (including Douglas Camfield and Richard Martin) appreciated his skill and professionalism. He played prominent roles in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (as Aslan, 1967), A Very British Coup (1988), Bomber Harris (1989, opposite John Thaw), The Kremlin, Farewell (as Stalin, 1990) and Russell T Davies’s Century Falls (1993).

In 1961 he was given six weeks’ paid leave and told to keep a low profile by the producers of Coronation Street after the angry public response to his killing of Ida Barlow. Though he appeared in several episodes of Z-Cars (1962-72), he turned down the offer of a regular role and guested in everything from The Avengers (1962) to Casualty 1909 (2009) via The Professionals (1978), Remington Steele (1987), Jonathan Creek (1997) and Foyle’s War (2002). His touching performance in an acclaimed episode of Colditz (1972), as a German corporal charged with checking the validity of a claim for repatriation by a prisoner (Michael Bryant) on the grounds of insanity, was one of his proudest achievements.

He played four different roles in Doctor Who opposite William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee, the best of which was a dignified turn as a gallant but war-weary Saladin (1965) – Kay’s subtle underplaying an effective contrast to Julian Glover’s petulant Richard the Lionheart. While rehearsing as Banquo in repertory theatre in Nottingham in 1952 he learned the role of Macbeth in less than 24 hours, saving an opening night imperilled by an injured leading man. He spent 1953 and 1954 with what later became the Royal Shakespeare Company and returned to their fold in 1991, proving a fine Glendower in Henry IV Part 1. Other theatre work included Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians, directed by Adrian Noble at the New Vic studio of the Bristol Old Vic (1979), Shylock in a British Council tour of The Merchant of Venice which culminated in Baghdad at the height of the Iran/Iraq war (1984), and Brecht’s Galileo at the Young Vic (1990).

The first chapter of his autobiography, Maybe a Bastard, describing his difficult early years in Bolton, came first in the New Writing Ventures awards in 2006. He entered the competition because he retained very sharp recall and he wanted to see if the writing skills that he had possessed as a young reporter had stayed with him at the age of 78.

One of the judges, the novelist Ali Smith, described his entry as “wise, taut, gripping and a perfect piece of explication”. His work on it stalled latterly because he found it difficult to write about his wife, the actor Patricia Haines. He never quite recovered from her death from cancer in 1977, at the age of 45.

Her daughter Niki, from her marriage to the actor Michael Caine, survives him.

• Bernard Frederic Bemrose Kay, actor, born 23 February 1928; died 25 December 2014

• This article was amended on 9 January 2015 to clarify that Bernard Kay spent 1953 and 1954 with what later became the Royal Shakespeare Company; it wasn’t officially known as that until 1961. Because of an editing error, the earlier version of the article also said Kay appeared in Comedians at the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme.

