Actor and director; Born March 26, 1936; Died June 13, 2008. John Malcolm, who has died aged 72, was the founder of not one but two theatres that helped change the cultural landscape on a global scale.

He played a major part in the founding of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre - on the site of a former brothel. A few years later, in Chipping Norton, he set up The Theatre, which he hoped would compete with the then Peter Hall-led Royal Shakespeare Company in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon. Throw in a stint with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, then blazing its own trail, and it's clear that Malcolm's own mercurial vision was never going to fit into any institution unless it was of his own making.

His death, following a long-term illness, brings to a close the at-times volatile life of a man who remained outspoken even as he was sidelined from the official history of the artistic climate he helped create.

Malcolm was born in Stirling in 1936. After a damaged childhood, and possibly in response to it, aged just 16 he trained as a Methodist lay preacher. Following an army tour to Hong Kong, a life on a more secular stage became his ambition.

Malcolm gained a scholarship to Rada, and in 1962 found himself summarily dismissed from what he considered to be a moribund and old-fashioned Pitlochry Festival Theatre rep season. By that time he had already appeared at the Royal Court, at St Martin's Theatre in The Playboy of the Western World, and in Joan of the Stockyards at the Dublin Festival.

As Joyce McMillan relates in her book The Traverse Theatre Story, on his agent's advice Malcolm took a part in that year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in a production of Fionn MacColla's Ane Tryall of Heretiks. Such a move was serendipitous for all involved, as the show presented in the paperback bookshop - the first of its kind in Britain - set up by Jim Haynes beside Edinburgh University, which had become something of a social hub for the nascent underground looking for enlightenment beyond the city's all-pervading Presbyterian mores. This was also the year that Haynes and publisher John Calder staged their International Writer's Conference, at which the avant-garde rubbed noses with the literary establishment in the McEwan Hall.

There had been talk by the Haynes/Richard Demarco axis about setting up some kind of permanent arts centre for years, but talk was all it had remained. Seeing the potential in such spaces as the university-run Sphinx Club in James Court, Malcolm seized the moment and approached Tom Mitchell, the future Traverse president who owned the James Court space.

Malcolm evangelised to Mitchell about the necessity for a full-time professional theatre space that could embrace the new. He also brought on board former Pitlochry stage manager Terry Lane, who would become the Traverse's first artistic director. Not for nothing, then, does McMillan's book describe Malcolm, in terms of his contribution to the muddied origins of the Traverse, as "in some ways the most important character of all".

As with many things concerning Malcolm, however, it didn't last. Even before the opening night of what had become the Traverse Theatre Club, he was gone. His departure followed a hectic time in the theatre, when he got into a row with Lane during rehearsals for Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clois. Lane thoroughly expected to be sent packing; it was Malcolm, though, who was sacked.

Following this, Malcolm appeared in television dramas including Crossroads and Dr Finlay's Casebook, and from 1964-66 was with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1968, he and his then wife Tamara, whom he met at Stratford, moved to Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds. Having spotted the potential in a former Salvation Army citadel, the Malcolms worked on its conversion with the same drive previously shown at the Traverse.

Malcolm left Chipping Norton and this new space - simply called The Theatre - following the end of his marriage in 1977, though Tamara remained in post as artistic director until 2002, and was awarded the MBE in 2000. During the years that followed the Theatre, he became a TV character actor of note, with credits in When the Boat Comes In, The Naked Civil Servant and Pennies from Heaven, plus numerous guest spots. He also carved something of a niche for himself playing on-screen Nazis, in a sequel to The Dirty Dozen, Enemy at the Door, War and Remembrance and David Hemmings's film The Key to Rebecca.

In 1980 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he played Truscott, the vicious detective in a revival of Joe Orton's subversive farce Loot. The production was directed by the equally capricious Kenneth Williams, for whom Orton had written the play. With two such single-minded figures put in such creative opposition, one can only speculate as to how the rehearsals went.

The Edinburgh to which Malcolm returned in the early 1990s was vastly different to the one he'd left. The Traverse now had a purpose-built space, and the city itself was far more liberal. He became one of those characters Edinburgh has been full of since the 1960s: someone who had been at the centre of the ferment of change, and was able to dine out on anecdotal legends of the era, yet who was in full possession of a fiery streak and stuck to his guns in the face of adversity. For the past few years, he was supported by the Actors' Benevolent Fund, and remained a firebrand to the last.

His is survived by his daughter Aimee and son Nathaniel.

NEIL COOPER