R.I.P. Aubrey Woods

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Aubrey Woods obituary

Graceful stage actor who stood out in Doctor Who on TV and the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Michael Coveney
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 May 2013 13.17 EDT

In a long and distinguished career, the actor Aubrey Woods, who has died aged 85, covered the waterfront, from West End revues and musicals to TV series and films, most notably, perhaps, singing The Candy Man in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), starring Gene Wilder, and playing the Controller in the Day of the Daleks storyline in Doctor Who (1972).

Tall and well-favoured in grace and authority on the stage, he played Fagin in the musical Oliver! for three years, succeeding Ron Moody in the original 1960 production. He was equally in demand on BBC radio, writing and appearing in many plays, including his own adaptations of the Mapp and Lucia novels by EF Benson (he was a vice-president of the EF Benson society).

In the early part of his career he was something of a Dickens specialist, appearing as a woefully thin Smike in Alberto Cavalcanti's film The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), his first job, as a 19-year-old (he played the dancing Mr Folair in a 1957 television version of the same book); the fading, impecunious Tony Jobling in Bleak House (for the BBC in 1959); and the more refined and cultivated clerk Mr Chuckster in The Old Curiosity Shop (also for the BBC, 1962).

He was the only child of Harold Victor Woods, who worked all his life for the publishers Macmillan, and his wife, Margery Ella. Raised in Palmers Green, north London, Woods was educated at the Latymer school in Edmonton (Bruce Forsyth was another pupil). He excelled at English and drama and won a Leverhulme scholarship to Rada in 1945. There, he met his future wife, Gaynor Woods. They married in 1952, by which time he was established in the West End and Gaynor had renounced her career.

He made his London debut in 1947 in Peter Brook's production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Men Without Shadows at the Lyric, Hammersmith. In 1952 he went to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he walked on in Ralph Richardson's Macbeth (directed by John Gielgud) and was favourably noticed by Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times.

He went to Moscow in 1955 with Paul Scofield's Stratford Hamlet, doubling the Player Queen with the Second Gravedigger, and returned to London in Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy at the Comedy theatre with Elizabeth Sellars and Keith Baxter. Then came his musical theatre debut as Jack Whorwood in Sandy Wilson's brilliantly witty Valmouth, based on the novel and other works by Ronald Firbank, at the Lyric, Hammersmith (and later the Saville theatre), in 1958.

This was followed by The Lord Chamberlain Regrets, a post-censorship revue at the Golders Green Hippodrome co-starring Joan Sims and Millicent Martin; that long stint in Oliver! at the Albery; and a year's engagement at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in The Four Musketeers (1967), a spoof historical romance written for Harry Secombe as D'Artagnan by Michael Pertwee, Laurie Johnson and the lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, in which Woods played a towering Cardinal Richelieu in a red cassock.

He was good at the "towering" but very good, too, at the "quiet", said the veteran BBC radio producer John Tydeman, who counted Woods among his closest friends, as did the composer Julian Slade, with whom Woods wrote a charming musical version of Arthur Wing Pinero's Trelawny of the Wells.

Trelawny, with additional material by the theatre scholar George Rowell, opened at the Bristol Old Vic in 1972 and was staged in London at Sadler's Wells, and then the Prince of Wales, under the producing auspices of Cameron Mackintosh (with Veronica Flint-Shipman), Mackintosh's first West End show. The critic JC Trewin included Woods's libretto in his annual compendium Plays of the Year.

Woods played both Palmerston and Gladstone in Charles Strouse's flaccid Queen Victoria musical I and Albert (starring Polly James) in 1972 and, in 1975, he was by no means miscast as the flamboyant M Le Grand in Mardi Gras, an ill-fated musical by Melvyn Bragg, Alan Blaikley and Ken Howard at the Prince of Wales. He figured, too, in a more favourably regarded flop, Strouse's Flowers for Algernon (1979), starring Michael Crawford, at the Queen's theatre.

There were seasons at Chichester – he played Sir Edward Carson to Tom Baker's Oscar Wilde in Feasting with Panthers – in the 1980s, and countless television appearances down the years in series as diverse as Hazell, Blake's 7, Maigret and London's Burning. In the extravagant 1991 London Palladium revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, directed by Steven Pimlott and starring Jason Donovan, he played Jacob and Potiphar.

Woods, who divided his domestic life between a house in Barnes, south-west London, and a cottage in the Lake District, is survived by Gaynor and many cousins. His last command performance – of The Candy Man – was given informally, and quite often, for the nurses in the hospital in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, where he was a much-loved patient.

• Aubrey Harold Woods, actor, born 9 April 1928; died 7 May 2013