Roger Rees

Born: May 5,1944;

Died: July 10, 2015.

Roger Rees, who has died of cancer aged 71, got his big break as an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company's monumental, two-part, eight-and-a-half hour dramatisation of Nicholas Nickleby.

First staged in London in 1980, it was a hit on Broadway the following year and shown on Channel 4 in 1982.

Rees spent 22 years with the RSC - after a season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre early in his career. But he reached his widest audience after Nicholas Nickleby and a move to the United States. He enjoyed great success with his own distinctive take on upper-class Englishness, despite his own relatively humble start to life in Wales.

He played the roguish millionaire businessman Robin Colcard on the sitcom Cheers (1989-93) and he brought humour and irony to the political drama series The West Wing (2000-0 5), on which he was the British ambassador Lord John Marbury.

Audiences could never be quite sure if Lord Marbury was a genius or a clown, if he really thought the straight-laced White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry was a butler called Gerald or if he was playing elaborate mind games, to keep him in his place.

"The world is coming apart at the seams," complains President Bartlet [corr.] (Martin Sheen). "Well then," proclaims Marbury, hair falling foppishly across his brow, "thank God, you sent for me." He thrusts his overcoat at McGarry (John Spencer), entrusting him with the task of looking after said garment, while his superiors prepare to set the world to rights.

Rees's RSC roles also included Hamlet, with a young Kenneth Branagh as Laertes, in 1984. But Rees observed: "The classical actor in England makes roughly the equivalent of a bus driver."

And he reckoned the role for which he was best-known internationally was that of the Sheriff of Rottingham in the Mel Brooks spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), which shot in California, like the Errol Flynn classic.

Born in Aberystwyth in 1944, Rees was the son of a policeman and a shop worker. He grew up mainly in London, but spent summers with a grandmother in Wales, sleeping outside in the kennel with the family boxer dog. He said he loved the outdoors and the countryside.

He described his school as "rough". He developed an early interest in theatre and the history of theatre, attracted initially by a dramatic photograph he saw from a 1945 production of Henry IV Part I, with Ralph Richardson's Falstaff carrying the dead body of Laurence Olivier's Hotspur.

He went to Slade art school in London, but had to drop out when his father died and take a job to support the family. His theatre career began not as an actor, but as a scenery painter at a theatre in Wimbledon.

The company's next production had a role for a youth, but no one to play it. He was painting scenery 40 ft above the stage when he heard a voice call up to him: "Would you like to be in a play the week after next?"

"I was just a 17-year-old boy painting scenery and I got offered the chance to be in a play," Rees said. "Suddenly I was an actor; it was an extraordinary thing. I'd never acted before, I just watched other people. The great break was a person who just thought, 'I need a young boy, let me look around - Oh, there's a young boy, I'll have him.'"

Buoyed by his stage debut, he applied to join the RSC and was told he did not have the voice for classical theatre. He applied to Pitlochry Festival Theatre instead and got a job there as a stage manager and prop maker.

"One of the actors at Pitlochry had an ear infection, so I was drafted in to play Yasha in The Cherry Orchard, Bruno in Dear Charles, lots of small parts, which gave me some confidence and authority. Later I re-auditioned for the RSC and got in."

He appeared in the RSC production of The Merchant of Venice at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, in 1972, and in the RSC's Edinburgh Festival productions of Twelfth Night and Chekov's Three Sisters in 1978.

His performance in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby brought him both Olivier and Tony awards. The adaptation was eight and a half hours long, performed in two parts. It opened the door for him in the United States and he became a US citizen in 1989.

His other film and television credits include The Scorpion King (2002), The Pink Panther (2006), The Prestige (2006) and a recurring role as a doctor on Grey's Anatomy (2007). He had a long-term professional and personal relationship with theatre writer and producer Rick Elice, who co-wrote the musical stage version of The Addams Family, in which Rees appeared as Gomez in 2010.

Also in 2010, he came back to the London stage, after an absence of 26 years, to take over from Patrick Stewart in the famous production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with Ian McKellen.

He had been appearing in the Broadway musical The Visit until a couple of months ago.

BRIAN PENDREIGH