Stage and screen actor whose good looks and rich voice captivated audiences for 60 years
Richard Johnson, who has died aged 87, was an MGM contract star and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company from its inception in 1960. In a career of astonishing range and variety, he was a handsome leading man – a 1958 Romeo, for instance, with Dorothy Tutin as Juliet – an action hero in wartime movies, a character actor, a producer, writer, lecturer and hotelier. He also turned down the role of James Bond in the first film of the series.
And yet he was not associated with any one role in particular, apart from Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, whom he played in both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra for the RSC in Trevor Nunn’s 1973 cycle of the Roman plays, with Janet Suzman as his feline Cleopatra.
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