Peter Grimes

Peter Grimes, who has died aged 48 following a long illness, was more than just an actor. He was an adventurer and a seeker, whose empathy, both with the characters he played and with the audiences he played to, reflected his sense of melancholy clowning with a deep-set truth at its heart.

This was the case whether appearing as Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as Shere Khan the tiger in The Jungle Book, as Barrabas, the thief pardoned as Jesus Christ was crucified behind him, or in the title role in an expansive production of Peer Gynt, Ibsen's classic fantastical romp of self-knowledge.

These characters reflected Grimes's own imagination, which was almost certainly too wild to fit into a theatrical mainstream, and it was telling that most of the theatre companies he worked for were similarly maverick operations which embraced the creative freedoms and techniques of European theatre.

This led to Grimes writing and directing his own work with such fellow travellers, including a version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea which he wrote for the Walk The Plank company, who sailed around Britain in a live-in "theatre ship".

Walk The Plank producer Liz Pugh remembers how "Peter loved the environment on board the theatre ship, when he joined us on tour in ports and harbours around Scotland".

Grimes was born and raised in Dundee as part of a musical family.

His older brother Ged was a founding member of Dundee band Danny Wilson, and now plays with Simple Minds, and his sister Jane was a member of the 1940s-influenced vocal harmony trio The Penny Dainties. Grimes' younger brother Mark is a former music teacher who now lives in Australia.

Grimes attended St Matthew's Primary School and Monifieth High School in Dundee between 1971 and 1983, and on leaving school trained as a psychiatric nurse. It was here he probably picked up the skills of empathy and creativity that he applied to his own art with such big-hearted openness and skill.

Grimes's first foray into acting came in the mid-1980s, with Dundee group, The Cat's Oot The Bag Theatre Company. Their production of Senga was a very local, Dundee take on the opera Carmen. Grimes then went on to be the narrator of Witches Blood, a large-scale community play produced by Dundee Rep in 1987. Performed in various locations throughout the city, the play culminated in an atmospheric finale at Dudhope Castle. With Grimes as the larger than life social glue keeping the play's narrative threads together, Witch's Blood's epic staging is still remembered as a seminal point in Dundee's cultural history.

This was followed by Keeping Right On to the End of the Road, a solo play devised with playwright John Harvey, one of Scotland's key exponents of community theatre at all levels. The show was premiered at the now demolished but then thriving Dundee Arts Centre, with Harvey declaring Grimes' performance as "extraordinary...so moving that rather than applause, the show ended in a kind of stunned silence"

Grimes' acting career took off, with an appearance in Liz Lochhead and Robert Robson's Them Through The Wall at Cumbernauld Theatre in 1988 ushering in a slew of creativity. At the Tron Theatre, he appeared in Anne Downie's The Witches of Pollok and Chris Hannan's The Baby, both directed by future RSC director Michael Boyd. At the Traverse he took the title role of John McKenzie's neglected fire-cracker of a play, Bomber. Grimes appeared at the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, and at Dundee Rep.

Grimes established long-term relationships with other theatre companies, including Gerry Mulgrew's Communicado company, with whom he appeared in Jock Tamson's Bairns, The Suicide, Portrait of A Woman, Tall Tales For Small People, Bicycle To The Moon and A Christmas Carol.

With the Royal Shakespeare Company, Grimes played Trinculo in Sam Mendes' production of The Tempest, appeared in Love's Labours Lost, Murder in the Cathedral and Gerry Mulgrew's production of Moby Dick, and was directed by Mark Thomson in The Glowing Manikin in which he played a tortured teenager "like a kind of Junior Hannibal Lecter."

With Boilerhouse Grimes played the title role in Barrabas, Lance Flynn's biblical epic that was presented at Tramway as the company's then biggest show to date. He went on to appear in other Boilerhouse shows, including No New Miracles, scripted by novelist Alan Warner.

Walk The Plank's Liz Pugh described Grimes as "playful, poetic and melancholic in equal measure, An amazing creative force, and a big man who always noticed the small details in how we live and love." Former Boilerhouse director Paul Pinson called Grimes "a friend, a confidante, a collaborator and an inspiration. He was fierce on quality and fiercely loyal."

Mark Thomson, who gave a eulogy at Grimes' funeral in Dundee last week, called Grimes "a vivid, big-hearted, imaginative larger than life character who made life an adventure for himself and anyone who was lucky enough to travel or work with him," and said "he had more imagination in his little finger than most of us in our entire bodies".

While Grimes' health diminished over recent years, his creativity never wavered, and he continued to write short stories, plays and poetry. Thomson sums up Grimes with lines spoken by Grimes when he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and "that moved me every time he spoke them because I felt Peter was connecting so personally about his intense relationship with the world".

The quote is: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

Grimes is survived his two sons, Joe and Liam, and his stepson David Evans.