My friend Andrew Jarvis, who has died aged 78, was an actor and drama teacher dedicated to the stage and, especially, to performing Shakespeare. Although never a star, he was a stalwart of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the English Shakespeare Company, combining a classical focus on the playwright’s text with an openness to theatrical innovation.
He joined the RSC in 1980, appearing in productions including Henry V with Kenneth Branagh in the title role (1984). In 1986, he opted to join the English Shakespeare Company that Michael Bogdanov assembled at the Old Vic, dedicated to rethinking the Bard and challenging audiences with a Marxist focus on the political context of the plays. Andy, always a radical, flourished in this context.
In the Wars of the Roses cycle, he was notable for playing Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1 (1986-87) and won the Manchester Evening News award for best actor in the title role in Richard III (1987-89). Also at the Old Vic he played Claudius in Yuri Lyubimov’s rethinking of Hamlet (1990).
Born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Andy was the son of Dora (nee Handbury), a secretary, and William Jarvis, a headmaster. He went to Chesterfield grammar school, then trained as a teacher at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, west London (1965-68).
After a brief period teaching English in schools, he wrote to all the repertory theatres in the country, and in 1969 was taken on by the Phoenix theatre in Leicester as an assistant stage manager and then an actor. Andy always believed that rep theatre offered the best training that an actor could have.
Following his time with the RSC and ESC, he taught at Mountview Theatre School, then in Crouch End, north London, where he was head of postgraduate performance courses (1997-2008). He excelled in communicating theatrical technique to younger actors based on his wide experience.
Such was his love of the stage that Andy rarely sought out film or television roles. He did, however, appear in episodes of EastEnders and the police procedural drama New Tricks. His long white beard made him a natural for the role of Merlin in the film Dragons of Camelot (2014).
He played Elrond and later Gandalf in the musical version of The Lord of the Rings at Drury Lane (2007-08) and spent a year as Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black at the Fortune theatre (2008-09). Andy also worked with Trevor Nunn, playing Polonius in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Gonzalo to Ralph Fiennes’s Prospero in The Tempest, both at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 2011.
He met the literary critic Gillian Piggott in 1991. They lived together in south London, later moving to a rectory outside King’s Lynn, in Norfolk. In this setting, Andy founded the King’s Lynn Shakespeare festival, persuading Ian McKellen to perform his one-man show in order to raise money for the development of St George’s Guildhall.
He and Gillian married in 2017, and she survives him.
