Primarily a stage actor of good grace, authority and a fine baritone voice, James Laurenson, who has died aged 84 after suffering with Parkinson’s disease, was a familiar face on television, stretching from a short-stay run as the Rev Peter Hope in Coronation Street in 1968 through to Sir John Weir, the physician royal, in The Crown (2016).
He had arrived on a boat from New Zealand in the early 1960s – as many artists did from those islands, and Australia, at that time – and by 1964 was treading the boards with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and London.
