By general consensus, Peter Bayliss, who has died at the age of 80 (or it may be 79, as in much else, he was enigmatic about his beginnings) was the actors' actor, a first among equals.

This son of Kingston upon Thames, who like Oscar Wilde's John Worthing, spoke of having been left ''at a gentlemen's convenience in Ware when he was eight years old,'' according to family friend and actor, Jasper Britton, enjoyed a career that spanned more than half a century. It saw its baptism as understudy in John Gielgud's final Hamlet in 1944, and first big break in Tyrone Guthrie's 1954 Edinburgh Festival production of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker (later to become the hit musical Hello Dolly!).

Bayliss enjoyed an almost continual run, appearing in more than 100 stage productions, 20 films (which ranged from The Red Shoes to Darling), 40 TV shows and series (including The Sweeney, Coronation Street, The Bill, as well as costume dramas such as Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times), and countless radio recordings. But it was on stage where his exuberant and singular gifts shone brightest.

Holder of the longest list of West End credits, Bayliss was an actor whose versatility and particular brand of English eccentricity lit up the stage. He stopped the show as Doolittle in Cameron Mackintosh's original revival of My Fair Lady (Adelphi, 1979) and also scored notable successes in a variety of roles, from the Guard in Ionesco's Exit the King (Royal Court, 1963) to Bernard Miles's peg-leg successor as Long John Silver at the Mermaid in Treasure Island (1963), and a gloriously bombastic Bottom in the Regent's Park's 1968 A Midsummer Night's Dream - a part he reprised nearly 30 years later.

Interestingly, he was never used by the Royal Shakespeare Company or the National Theatre, though George Devine, Yuko Ninagawa, and Jonathan Miller valued his worth.

Standing at over six feet tall with a voice to match, his unpredictability and invention made him a handful for some directors and a joy for audiences.

It also ensured that those who appreciated his gifts worked with him over and over again. These included the writer Peter Barnes, for whom he appeared twice as a ripe Justice Overdo in Barnes's own adaptations of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (Roundhouse, 1978 and Regent's Park, 1987), and in the late 1990s three plays at the National Theatre Studio.

Jonathan Miller who first cast him as a disturbed Solyony in Chekhov's Three Sisters (Cambridge 1976) and revelatorily as an older Bottom in his Freudian, balefully funny revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Almeida in 1996.

As late as 1999, Bayliss was employing his subversive talents to hilarious effect in a critically damned Macbeth at the Queen's Theatre, when he will long be remembered for turning the Porter's speech into a stream of knock-knock jokes. Not for nothing had he learnt his comic apprenticeship at the feet of Tommy Handley and Frankie Howerd. He could milk an audience with the best of them.

Bayliss was trained and educated at the Italia Conti Stage School. Leslie Phillips was one of his contemporaries and has written: ''My first clear memory of him was over a poker table,'' going on to mark him out as ''a good loser - a rare thing - but more often a good winner, as I found to my cost.''

Bayliss appeared in Phillips's long-running comedy, The Man Most Likely To (1969), the same year as Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw received its posthumous premiere in which Bayliss was tailor-made for poor old Sergeant Match who finds himself so disturbingly cross-dressed at the end. Bayliss was dressed fetchingly in figure-hugging leopardskin for the part.

Other memorable performances included Hobson in Hobson's Choice (1973), Ernest in Noel Coward's Design for Living (1974), a heartbreaking Fool to Eric Porter's King Lear (Old Vic, 1989), and, fitting him to a tee, the old actor-pro Telfer in Trelawney of the Wells (Comedy, 1993).

An inveterate off-stage practical joker, his answerphone messages became as legendary as the invisible dog he adopted for some years to help out with difficult contract negotiations: the dog would bark when Bayliss failed to be satisfied with the figure being offered.

A protean larger-than-life, loveable if intensely private personality, he remained to the end, even to those who knew him well, an enigma and a treasure. He never married.

Peter Bayliss, actor; born June 27, 1922; died July 29, 2002.