Stephen Moore: Seasoned character actor who shone in comedy and drama

Stephen Moore was a gifted British actor who worked steadily on stage, film and TV in a career that spanned nearly seven decades.

Moore, who has died aged 81, moved easily between drama and comedy but will perhaps be best remembered as the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the radio series and later TV series of Douglas Adams’s comic sci-fi creation The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Born in Brixton, south London, Moore was the son of Mary Elisabeth (nee Bruce-Anderson) and solicitor Stanley Moore. He attended the Archbishop Tenison’s grammar school in Kennington, then trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama across 1956-59.

Upon graduating he made his stage debut in A View from the Bridge at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, then found regular work at the Old Vic where he appeared in many productions, including several Shakespeare plays. He worked in regional repertory theatres, his profile increasing after he handled the lead roles in Bristol’s Old Vic productions of The Iceman Cometh and Hedda Gabler (both 1971).

Across the 1970s he began getting regular television work – playing Julie Covington’s morose husband in Rock Follies (1976) won him prominence – but he never lost his love for the stage, continuing to appear in major roles at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company productions across the 1980s.

He appeared in several films, the best known of which was Richard Attenborough’s epic Second World War feature A Bridge Too Far – where he held his own against many far more famous actors – but it was in supporting roles in television comedies that Moore proved most memorable. The first series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had appeared on Radio 4 in 1978 and Moore was perfectly cast as Marvin the Paranoid Android, a failed prototype robot with “genuine people personalities”.

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The success of the Radio 4 series led to a 1979 double album cast recording – with Moore handling Marvin and other minor characters – and, once Adams had turned the series into bestselling books, they were adapted for TV in 1980. Here Adams ensured that Moore returned to voice Marvin alongside appearing in other roles on the show.

Middle age suited Moore as a character actor and he regularly appeared on British TV shows – from Casualty to Middlemarch – gaining his greatest recognition playing Adrian Mole’s father in the TV series The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole in the late 1980s. A decade later he again played a father to a troubled youngster, this time as dad to Harry Enfield’s extremely petulant Kevin the Teenager in Harry Enfield and Chums in 1997.

In both his light touch, comic timing and sense of befuddled, middle-class exasperation, Moore proved the perfect foil to the series stars’ as they thrashed about in overheated adolescent angst. Indeed, there were few actors anywhere who could match Moore in shifting so effortlessly from performing comic knockabout material on TV to handling extremely serious drama on stage: he returned to the RSC to support Judi Dench in a superb production of Mother Courage and Her Children, played Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, played the old Peer Gynt in 1990 and was back at the National Theatre to play the mayor in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. He toured in productions of My Fair Lady and The History Boys, returned to film for the last time in Richard Curtis’s wretched 2009 pirate radio comedy The Boat That Rocked and made engaging cameos on Doctor Who and Holby City in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

Moore was married four times. Firstly to Barbara Mognaz (divorced); then to Celestine Randall (divorced); then to Beth Morris (divorced) and finally to Noelyn George (who predeceased him in 2010). He is survived by five children, including the former EastEnders actor Robyn Moore.

Stephen Vincent Moore, actor, born 11 December 1937, died 4 October 2019