I have never forgotten my first sighting of David Warner, who has died aged 80. As a teenager in Leamington Spa in the late 1950s, I used to haunt the bookshop in a local department store, Burgis and Colbourne, where serving behind the counter was a lanky, straw-haired guy in an ill-fitting Dickensian suit. I had no idea who he was, until, in 1963, I saw him on the Stratford stage playing Trinculo, Cinna the Poet and, eventually, Henry VI. The eccentric-looking bookseller was, I suddenly realised, a potentially great actor.
Warner’s stage career falls into two distinct halves: a youthful decade of riotous acclaim and a late-life flowering separated by a period from 1972 to 2001 when he forsook the stage to carve out a career in cinema. Yet in both youth and age he showed similar gifts: an innate gentleness of spirit, a sense of latent melancholy, an inquisitive intellect. Drawn together in later years by our shared Midlands background, I discovered that the qualities that informed his acting were also an essential part of his character.
