published 26/06/2013 at 18:25 BST by Michael Coveney
Popular RSC actor who was also a regular in TV drama
David Lyon was a familiar face on stage and screen. Photograph: Sophie Baker
David Lyon, who has died aged 72, was a popular and versatile actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company for two
decades. He once played a serious criminal in the television series Midsomer Murders, and a taxi driver who recognised him in Brighton, where Lyon lived, said that he'd just put a call through to the local police station. This was a mark, perhaps, of Lyon's ease and naturalness on stage and on screen, where he popped up regularly in such series as The Bill, Lovejoy,
Taggart, Poirot and as the thoroughly decent prime minister, Henry "Hal" Collingridge, in the original 1990 BBC version of House of Cards, held secretly in contempt by Ian Richardson's
duplicitous Francis Urquhart. He was always someone you would recognise.
Lyon was a late developer in the professional theatre, coming from a long association with two of the most
distinguished amateur companies in the land: the Old Grammarians in Glasgow and the Crescent theatre in Birmingham. He always said that the two people who changed his life were George Hall and
John Jones, his teachers at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, who remained lifelong friends and, indeed, neighbours in Brighton.
Lyon was the only child of a diamond merchant, Joe Lyon, and his wife, Margaret. He grew up in Sierra Leone, where
his father worked, but was sent home to prep school in Scotland, Crofton House in Dumfriesshire, aged seven. He won a scholarship to Merchiston Castle school in Edinburgh, where, at 15, he played
scrum-half for the school's first XV.
He left school at 16, after his father was declared bankrupt and returned to run a guest house on the Isle of Cumbrae at Millport, near Largs. Lyon worked for Royal Insurance in Glasgow before moving to Birmingham and taking a job as a salesman with a flooring
company; towards the end of his life he was told he had asbestos in his lungs.
Aged 30, he took the leap to drama school in London and met his future wife, Sandra Clark, then married to someone else, at the Library theatre in Manchester, his first job, in 1975. He played in
repertory theatres in Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds and Sheffield before joining the RSC in 1976, where he played a long string of supporting roles in Shakespeare and modern plays, including Pam
Gems's Piaf.
He lived for many years with the actor Zoë Wanamaker, also in the RSC at that time, before meeting up again with Clark in 1989 and marrying her when they played Capulet and Lady Montagu in Romeo
and Juliet at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1998; they were known in the company as "Lord and Lady Lyon" and spent their
honeymoon touring with the show.
They were together again, too, in Michael Attenborough's RSC productions of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, playing in a company that included Desmond Barrit (as Falstaff), William Houston (as Hal) and
David Troughton (as Henry IV); Edward Hall directed them in Henry V. Most of Lyon's career in the past 10 years was
on television.
He retained an enthusiasm for rugby and cricket all his life and was always a popular company member on account of his warmth and quiet sense of humour. He is survived by Sandra and his
stepchildren, Sula and Archie, in whom he took great pride.
- David Laurie Lyon, actor, born 16 May 1941; died 7 June 2013