Prolific stage performer who made his professional debut in the 1945 production The Hasty Heart. Despite making his film debut in the Boulting Brothers Seven Days to Noon (1950), he was hardly seen again in films until the 1970s, when he played a string of characters that often hid various shades of wickedness beneath a florid complexion and a beaming smile.

But the stage gave him his biggest hit - as Peron in the London production of Evita. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he mixed scene-stealing character roles with some really nasty villains, as Greta Scacchi's scheming husband in White Mischief (1987), and a villainous South African diplomat in Lethal Weapon II (1989).

He was awarded a C.B.E., the Commander of the British Empire. One of his more familiar portrayals is that of a Russian official in films including The Hunt for Red October (1990), Citizen X (1995) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002).