Switching effortlessly from stage to screen and drama to comedy, Timothy West , who has died aged 90, was a remarkably prolific actor over seven decades. Some of his most acclaimed performances were in Shakespearean productions, but he had a range and versatility that extended beyond the classics. West’s tour de force came when he brought his towering presence to the title role of Edward the Seventh (1975), ITV’s 13-part account of the life of Queen Victoria’s son “Bertie”, who spent 59 years waiting to ascend the throne and was recorded by history as a bully and philanderer.
The drama, with West’s sympathetic portrayal of Edward from the age of 23, made him a household name. “I felt very warmly towards this somewhat marginalised monarch,” he wrote in his 2001 autobiography, A Moment Towards the End of the Play. “He had a pretty awful life, really.
” In 1979, after acting as the scheming Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII , West played another 20th-century historical figure, Winston Churchill, in Churchill and the Generals , aided by his physical resemblance to the wartime leader – with added prosthetic nose and ears, and blue contact lenses. As in many of the roles he took, his performance transcended the stuffiness to which period dramas are prone, and moved one reviewer to write that the television film was “intermittently moving and fun”. He played Churchill again in the 1984 miniseries The Last Bastion and the 1995 TV movie Hiroshima .
West turned to .