The actor Ian Gelder, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a notable supporting player at the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End and in leading fringe theaters for decades before finding television fame as Kevan Lannister, brother of the feared patriarch Tywin (Charles Dance), who planned a Shakespearean power grab in Game of Thrones (2011-16). He also exerted the devious side of his acting persona as the villainous Mr Dekker in Russell T Davies' Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood, for five episodes in 2009.
Gelder could be seedy and scandalous: as the suspicious Ed in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane in a 1993 revival of Jeremy Sams, in which his future life partner, Ben Daniels, was the object of his twisted affection; or as a pot-bellied, leather-clad biker in a 1981 Birmingham Rep revival of Michel Tremblay's Hosanna, whining with his partner, a drag queen played by Jim Hooper.
Mostly, though, his default modus operandi was that of nuanced moral rectitude and deftly conveyed charm. Lightly built and gracefully furnished, it was as eminently observable as it was unfailingly audible.
He could even make something substantial out of an essentially dull character, twice in the role of Titus Andronicus' brother Marcus in Shakespeare's bloodiest play - first with the RSC in 2003 (David Bradley as Titus); then at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014 (starring William Houston) - exuding a contradictory, moderating presence in a world of wild excess.
There was always something controlled and stealthy about his acting, always a pleasure to watch. He never talked about it much, he just went about his business. One of his most important associations was with the acerbic, brilliant playwright Peter Nichols, whose younger self he twice played in fictional disguise - in the beautiful, autobiographical family memoir Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), at the Greenwich Theater and the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue; and as the calm soldier Steven Flowers in the glorious Privates on Parade (1977), together with Denis Quilley, Joe Melia and Nigel Hawthorne at a military concert party in South East Asia for the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Aldwych, where it lasted more than 200 performances.
Ian, the youngest child of Raymond White, an engineer and electronics buyer, and Clare (née Gelder), an office manager of an antiques dealer, and a keen participant in amateur theater when the family moved to Wokingham, Berkshire in the early 1960s, took the maiden name from his mother when he became an actor.
She involved the whole family in the activities of the Wokingham Players - Raymond provided the lighting - and it soon became clear that Ian had found his calling. After attending Forest grammar school in nearby Winnersh, he won a place at the Bristol Old Vic theater school, where his contemporaries included Jeremy Irons, Tim Pigott-Smith and Christopher Biggins.
After graduating, he played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice on a British Council tour and, on either side of Forget-Me-Not-Lane, performed seasons at the Northcott in Exeter, the Young Vic in London and the RSC in Stratford (Silvius in As You Like It and Talbot in Terry Hands' production of Henry VI, with Emrys James and Helen Mirren).
From 1972 he regularly played small roles on television, appearing as Prince Alfred in five episodes of Edward the Seventh (1975), starring Annette Crosbie and Timothy West; and as Rumpole to Bailey's son, Nick, a sociology professor in Miami, described by his father (Leo McKern) as "the brains of the family". Christine Edzard's remarkable six-hour film Little Dorrit (1987) featured a cast of nine, from Derek Jacobi, Joan Greenwood and Alec Guinness to Robert Morley and Alan Bennett; Gelder was Rev. Samuel Barnacle.
In the mid-1980s he was a regular leading man at the vibrant Cambridge Theater Company, then under director Bill Pryde, playing Lockwood, the storyteller in Wuthering Heights; the aristocratic fortune seeker Archer in George Farquhar's great Restoration comedy The Beaux' Stratagem; and multiple roles in the complete five-play cycle of George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, a futuristic fantasy once described by biographer and critic Michael Holroyd as a masterpiece of wishful thinking.
Gelder was always a popular cast member, not least in Nancy Meckler's touring Shared Experience - as an icy Karenin melting into deep wells of longing and pain in Anna Karenina (1997), and as a surprised, anxious and ultimately bereft Fielding in A Passage to the Indies (2003). Also with Nicholas Hytner's National Theater (2004-05) - in David Hare's Iraq war analysis, Stuff Happens (as Paul Wolfowitz); Hytner's stunning production of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, edited by Nicholas Wright; and as a deft double of a noble politician ("saucy" Worcester) and a country boy in Henry IV's epic arsenal, led by Michael Gambon's Falstaff.
In a beautiful, painstaking revival of Arnold Wesker's Roots by James Macdonald at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013, Gelder found ways to reach directly into our emotions as Beatie Bryant's father, and for Michael Attenborough at the Almeida the same year he was a remarkably loyal and stoic Kent versus Jonathan Pryce's coiled and enraged King Lear. Once again he made goodness convincing.
In 2015, he produced a thrilling performance at the Southwark Playhouse as the predatory British filmmaker James Whale in Gods and Monsters (a more intense adaptation than even Ian McKellen's big screen breakthrough of 1998), romping with a young bare-bottomed gardener in Hollywood. and communicating superbly, as Paul Taylor said in the Independent, 'the waxy, fussy humor and the fear of mental disintegration' after a recent stroke.
There was more "reminiscence of flings past" (David Jays in the Guardian) in Something in the Air (2022), a lyrical short play for two old men in a care home - Gelder had partnered with Christopher Godwin - written and co-directed by Peter Gill at the Jermyn Street theatre.
He and Ben entered into a registered partnership in 2008. For the past five years they have lived in a cottage in East Sussex, with a lovingly tended garden.
He is survived by Ben and his brother, Keith.
* Ian Gelder (Ian Denbigh White), actor, born June 3, 1949; died May 6, 2024
