Outstanding actor of stage and screen who made his name as Bri in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
The British theatre changed for ever when Joe Melia, as the sardonic teacher Bri, pushed a severely disabled 10-year-old girl in a wheelchair on to the stage of the Glasgow Citizens in May 1967 and proceeded to make satirical jokes about the medical profession while his marriage was disintegrating. The play was Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which transformed the way disability was discussed on the stage. It made the names overnight of its author, the director Michael Blakemore, and Melia. Albert Finney took over the role of Bri on Broadway.
Flat-footed, slightly hunched, always leaning towards a point of view, Melia, who has died aged 77, was a distinctive and compassionate actor who brought a strain of the music hall to the stage, a sense of being an outsider. As he demonstrated in the Nichols play, he was more than adept at straddling the stage and the audience in a conspiracy of co-operation.
He struck gold again with Nichols 10 years later when he played the foul-mouthed disciplinarian Corporal Len Bonny in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Privates on Parade, again directed by Blakemore (who also directed the 1983 film). Melia was hilarious, suspended in his own lunatic dyspepsia between the gormless Private Flowers, for whom the play is a rite of passage, Nigel Hawthorne's Major Giles Flack and the antics of the army stage show led by Denis Quilley as the flouncing Captain Terri Dennis.
Melia's vaudevillian tendencies suited his clown roles such as Touchstone, Thersites and Autolycus during a 16-year spell at the RSC, with which he also won an Olivier supporting actor award in 1982 for his performance as a Jewish doctor who wants to become a true German in CP Taylor's Good, while Alan Howard wrestled with the concept of being a "good" Nazi.
Melia was born above a barber's shop in Camden, north London, the son of immigrant Italian parents who relocated to Leicester during the second world war. He attended the City of Leicester boys' grammar school, did his national service with the Intelligence Corps and went to Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English and (spotted by Michael Frayn) appeared with the Footlights revue, which led directly to a film role in Too Many Crooks (1959), a criminal comedy romp starring Terry-Thomas, Sid James and George Cole.
He then played two significant takeover roles in long-running hits: Peter Brook's production of the musical Irma La Douce and, in 1963, the Jonathan Miller material in Beyond the Fringe at the Fortune. He was so good in the latter that he was acclaimed by Miller himself, and went on to become a fixture on television comedy and satire shows for a decade or more, even appearing on the panel game Call My Bluff.
Melia had a droll sense of humour and a dry wit. This put him in the frame for a wide range of stage roles, not just in revue-type material – he warmed up for Beyond the Fringe in One to Another (1959) at the Lyric Hammersmith alongside Beryl Reid, Sheila Hancock and Patrick Wymark – but also in such serious drama as Bernard Kops's Enter Solly Gold (1970), about a false messiah, disguised as a rabbi, who causes havoc in a materialistic household; and Who's Who (1973), a beautifully written adult sex comedy by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall in which he happily returned to the Fortune.
Because of his ability to play "sideways on" to an audience, he was a perfect performer in Brecht, following an appearance in Happy End at the Royal Court in 1965 with the leading role of Macheath in Tony Richardson's gloriously eclectic production of The Threepenny Opera at the Prince of Wales in 1972, co-starring Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Windsor and Hermione Baddeley.
At the RSC, he went beyond clowning in his contribution to Terry Hands's stunning production of Peter Barnes's The Bewitched, a black, sardonic epic about the Spanish Inquisition, and in the rediscovery of John O'Keefe's long-forgotten, riotous 18th-century Wild Oats which – with a cast also including Howard, Zoë Wanamaker and Jeremy Irons – transferred from the Aldwych to the West End and re-entered the nation's repertory.
Hands – who counted Melia "an extraordinarily rich and complex talent" – was his ideal director, and he responded with a great gallery of RSC performances, not just as the scavenging, scampering Thersites in Hands's black fur and burnished metal Troilus and Cressida (with David Suchet as Achilles), but also a cringing chief of police in Jean Genet's brothel-bound The Balcony at the Barbican in 1987, the same year as his Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, with Simon Russell Beale and Penny Downie.
Television work ranged from an ideally confidential storyteller on the BBC children's programme Jackanory to a regular slot on series such as A Very Peculiar Practice and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (he was Mr Prosser) in the 1980s. His film work was sporadic, but included a small role in Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise (1966), with Dirk Bogarde and Monica Vitti, and another one (the photographer) in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).
He last appeared with the RSC in 1989, as the Chorus in Peter Flannery's Singer, and his last notable West End roles, in 1992, were the subtly argumentative Burglar in Trevor Nunn's handsome all-star Haymarket revival of Shaw's Heartbreak House (with Paul Scofield, Redgrave, Daniel Massey and Felicity Kendal) and one of the vivid theatricals in Pinero's Trelawney of the Wells (with Michael Hordern, Sarah Brightman and Helena Bonham Carter).
Melia was a strong and likable personality who could dominate any theatre green room. For many years, he and his wife, Flora, whom he married in 1963, lived in Primrose Hill, London, settling in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1998. Flora died in 2008. He is survived by two sons, Jonathan and Joseph.
• Joe (Giovanni) Philip William Melia, actor, born 23 January 1935; died 20 October 2012