If there is one role that epitomised the quirky charm of the actor Ralph Riach, it was John James McIver in Hamish Macbeth. Riach, who has died aged 86, played the character known as “TV John” in the whimsical mid-1990s BBC Scotland series with a winning air of innocence and wisdom.
Those qualities were a perfect match for John, the clairvoyant colleague of Robert Carlyle’s rural police officer in the fictional town of Lochdubh. In his black beret and buttoned-up shirt, he had a seriousness of purpose offset by an edge of eccentricity.
Those same qualities were evident in a varied stage and screen career that began only in his late 40s. His TV roles included Willy Stebbings in the ITV series Chancer (1990-91) and Dr Gilmore in Doctor Finlay (1993-94), while on film he played a priest in Braveheart (1995) and Ernie in Cloud Atlas (2012).
The youngest of three brothers, born and educated in Elgin, Moray, he had his first taste of acting at eight in a boys’ club show and was given piano lessons from 11, but took what he called the “safe route” into office work.
His jobs were many. He worked as an architectural draughtsman, in New Scotland Yard and as a furniture upholsterer. In Perth, where he became a theatrical landlord, his guests included the actors Richard Todd and Jimmy Logan. The latter advised against an acting career but went on to give him his first professional job in a 1984 staging of Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife.
He was in his mid-40s when he enrolled as a drama student at what is now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. A year behind him was a 17-year-old Alan Cumming, now a Hollywood and Broadway star. “It was like having your dad at college,” said Cumming who played Dionysus alongside Riach’s Tiresias in John Tiffany’s 2007 production of The Bacchae for the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS). “Ralph would go, ‘Alan Cumming, you missed a movement class this morning because you were hungover. Do you know how many people would like your place on this course? Don’t you miss a class again.’ We were friends ever since.”
Coming to theatre late in life gave Riach a certainty of purpose. “I found him very restful because he knew who he was and was content in his skin,” said the actor Siobhan Redmond, who met him in the 1980s working on Liz Lochhead’s play The Big Picture. She also played alongside him in Mary Stuart for the NTS (2006) and Karen Gillan’s directorial movie debut The Party’s Just Beginning (2018).
His earliest professional work was in Logan’s popular comedies, but he gravitated towards the challenges of new writing. In the landmark 1985 season at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh, he starred in Jo Clifford’s Losing Venice and Chris Hannan’s Elizabeth Gordon Quinn. “As William Quinn in Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, he was so moving and truthful,” recalled his fellow actor Simon Donald. “When he walked out of the family home, he flung his hat on the ground as a gesture of pique and it hit his foot so it looked really weak; instead of being a grand gesture, it became this silly thing. He made that moment.”
In John McKay’s 1988 hit comedy Dead Dad Dog, also for the Traverse, Riach played a cantankerous ghost opposite Sam Graham as the son who had buried him 12 years earlier. Stephen Unwin’s production made the most of Riach’s height – he was 6ft 2in – and oddball charisma, as he and Graham threw chairs about an empty stage to create their comic theatrical world.
When Donald branched out as a screenwriter, he would write parts specifically with Riach in mind. He cast him as Billy Connolly’s best friend in the BBC drama Deacon Brodie (1997), a bureaucratic butcher in the Channel 4 miniseries Low Winter Sun (2006) and as Ralfi Sigurdson in the Sky Arctic Circle drama Fortitude (2015).
Friends recalled Riach as being cheeky, curmudgeonly, stylish, spiky, joyous, opinionated, loyal, coarse and sophisticated. “He had the best put-downs,” said Cumming, who delighted in calling him Grumpy Ralph. “He was someone who said the most awful things to you but you know they’re just ribbing you.”
Riach, who never lost his love of sewing from his time as an upholsterer, had a “great gift for stitching us all together”, Redmond said. Whether friends were interested in gardening, cooking, classical music or cryptic crosswords, Riach stitched them into the same tapestry. “There are actors who’ve never met Ralph who know you could phone him at the interval for help with the Guardian crossword,” she added. “He had friends of different kinds but we all knew about each other.”
Riach is survived by his son, Drew, and grandchildren, Jen and Tom.
• Ralph Riach, actor, born 26 January 1936; died 20 March 2022
