The actor was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for 17 years, known for taking on the entire range of the playwright’s kings

Alan Howard, one of the most distinguished interpreters of Shakespeare’s kings, has died aged 77.

The actor is celebrated, first for his 17-year run with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and for a series of striking roles at the National Theatre throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

He began his career in 1958 at the Belgrade theatre in Coventry, before making the jump to the West End – soon he was embarking on his first major Shakespearean roles alongside the likes of Ralph Richardson and Judi Dench. He then joined the RSC in 1966, where as well as tackling formidable leads in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, he took on all of Shakespeare’s kings, including two versions of Henry V.

After he left the RSC, with whom he also toured to the US, Australia, Japan and throughout Europe, there were other major Shakespeare parts like Macbeth and King Lear as well as a crack at Tom Stoppard’s postmodern riff on the bard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Amid a series of major productions at the National Theatre and elsewhere, he variously appeared as blind prophet Tiresias opposite Ralph Fiennes in a stark take on Oedipus, played Vladimir in a Peter Hall-directed Waiting For Godot with Ben Kingsley, and performed in a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Howard performs in a scene of Troilus and Cressida with Michael Pennington, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and David Suchet.

There were spells of TV and film work too, with his biggest on-screen role as the lover Michael in Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. A curio in his CV is that he played the voice of the ring in the Lord of the Rings saga. He was awarded a CBE in 1998.

Frances Barber was among those paying tribute on Twitter, writing that he was “a wonderful actor & a wonderful man.” He is survived by his wife, novelist Sally Beauman, and their son James.

Helen Mirren also paid tribute to Howard saying: “Alan Howard was a member of a very small group of actors who could truly be called a great classical actor. I do not know of another actor who could reinvent a line of Shakespeare time and time again with imagination and intelligence the way he could. He was always exciting and inspiring, always trying to find the material anew. He had prodigious talents to play with, a superb voice, an athletic frame, and a profound and subtle way of approaching the material.

“I often had the privileged position of being able to watch him from the wings of the theatre. This I would do, trying to learn something unlearnable. Because only Alan could be what Alan was.

“There was always a danger in what he did, a sense that he was performing a high wire act, in the way that a high wire act combines great technique with the danger of the unexpected. He is a huge loss to British theatre.”

• This article was amended on 19 February 2015 to correct the spelling of Tiresias.

