The actor Ian Gelder, who has died of cancer aged 74, was a notable supporting player at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the West End and in leading fringe theatres for decades before finding television fame as Kevan Lannister, brother of the feared patriarch Tywin (Charles Dance), who planned a Shakespearean power grab in Game of Thrones (2011-16). He also exercised the devious side of his acting personality as the villainous Mr Dekker in Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood, across five episodes in 2009.
Gelder could be louche and outrageous: as the leery-eyed Ed in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane in a 1993 revival by Jeremy Sams, which featured his future life partner, Ben Daniels, as the object of his warped affections; or as a paunchy, leather-clad biker in a 1981 Birmingham Rep revival of Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, bitching away with his partner, a drag queen played by Jim Hooper.
