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The character actor Desmond Barrit, who has died aged 81, was renowned for playing both of Shakespeare’s Falstaffs – in Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor – for the Royal Shakespeare Company; for a string of leading performances at the National Theatre including in two Alan Bennett plays, The History Boys (as an inspirational teacher) and The Habit of Art (as WH Auden), in the wake of Richard Griffiths in the first productions; and for three stints as the Wizard in the musical Wicked, in the West End of London, at the Apollo Victoria theatre.

He also played the US vice-president Dick Cheney in a quiet, measured performance at the National in David Hare’s brilliant Stuff Happens (2004), a White House history play with elements of documentary and verbatim reportage in response to the Iraq war. The director was Nicholas Hytner, who had been responsible for kickstarting Barrit’s career by casting him as an innkeeper (with hunchback and withered leg) in his 1985 Chichester production of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Donald Sinden as Sir Percy Blakeney. “Rung any good bells lately?” inquired Sir Percy in Beverley Cross’s zingy rewrite of Baroness Orczy’s French Revolution warhorse.

Already a late-starter – after years as an accountant and in amateur theatre – Barrit first joined the RSC in 1988, as the put-upon porter Tom Errand in George Farquhar’s delightful Restoration comedy The Constant Couple. He was often described as the best actor nobody knew about, and this was because he never made a lasting impact on television or in the movies. But on stage he was sublime – funny, camp, sympathetic, instinctive and technically accomplished, with no obvious effort involved. And he had a good baritone voice.

The critic Paul Taylor said Barrit resembled the love child of Widow Twankey and one of the kindlier Roman emperors. And there was a lot of give and take, and leeway, between those two extremes. His comic weight could swing both ways, tragedy and comedy. When asked by Taylor in 2000 if he was going to the gym with the other RSC actors, he replied: “Listen, darling, I’ve always said that since I’ve gone to seed, I haven’t stopped working. And that suits me perfectly. I don’t want to go anywhere near a gym.”

He told another interlocutor in 2007: “As a friend of mine says, ‘For a person with a face like a slapped arse, you’ve done really well.’”

He did do very well indeed. In that same 1988 Stratford-on-Avon season, he was a rambunctious Trinculo in Hytner’s production of The Tempest, with John Wood as the supreme Prospero, and an ingratiating Porter in the Miles Anderson Macbeth directed by Adrian Noble. He followed up in 1990 in the surreal, Magritte-style Comedy of Errors, directed by Ian Judge, in which he played both Antipholuses, of Syracuse and Ephesus, roles that earned him an Olivier award for best comedy performance. Graham Turner played both Dromios in the wittiest RSC double act since Peter Brook paired Oberon and Theseus (Alan Howard) with Titania and Hippolyta (Sara Kestelman) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970.

In 1994 with the RSC, Barrit played a glorious Malvolio in Twelfth Night – the best since Sinden’s – smearing down strands of hair in a Bobby Charlton look and appearing “cross-gartered and yellow-stockinged” before the astonished Olivia like a large, lubricious bumblebee; and a superbly energetic Bottom as a comic leather-clad ass in motorcycle goggles, veteran of am-dram, transformed in pointy ears and Ken Dodd gnashers.

Barrit was born Desmond Brown in Morriston, Swansea, the only child of Islywn Brown, a coalminer, and his wife, Gwyneth (nee West), who died when Desmond was a teenager. His father remarried, to Mari Whitefoot, and Desmond acquired a stepbrother, Michael.

The family moved from Morriston to north Cornelly, near Bridgend. Desmond was educated at Garw grammar school where, aged 14, he played Hamlet for the school’s 50th anniversary. He left home aged 18 and went to London, where he played Laertes at the North London Polytechnic and worked in accountancy and am-dram.

In the mid-1970s he was bet by a friend that he could not get a job in the professional theatre. He promptly answered an advert in the Stage and won the bet: he was employed by a puppet show. This led to an Equity card but he had to change his name as Desmond Brown was already taken.

He was acting in rep and bits and pieces, including in TV series such as Holby City and Midsomer Murders, until Hytner gave him his big break. By then, he had met his lifetime partner, Byron Johnson, a petroleum engineer, in an East End pub, in 1982. They entered into a civil partnership in 2015.

One of my favourite performances was his sullen valet to Alex Jennings’s would-be cavalier in Corneille’s 17th-century comedy, The Liar, beautifully directed at the Old Vic by Jonathan Miller in 1989. He was seriously hacked-off as a blubbery, trembling Leporello-style servant who saves his master’s skin while really wanting to flay it.

Barrit paused his RSC career in 1997 with a period writing, directing and appearing in pantomimes at the Theatre Royal, Norwich. He acquired a second home in Sheringham on the Norfolk coast, where he also directed and produced in the Little theatre in 2002-03, expanding his panto business to the Gorleston Pavilion, Great Yarmouth, from 2004 to 2022.

But he was also committed to the National Theatre, appearing there as Captain Brazen, a fantastical fop, in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in 1992, and as a mysterious magician in Pirandello’s last, baffling, unfinished play (finished by Charles Wood in William Gaskill’s NT production), The Mountain Giants, in 1993.

He continued to prosper at the NT once Hytner had moved into the hot seat as artistic director in 2003: as Pseudolus in the riotous A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 2004, with songs by Stephen Sondheim; and as a superstar sub for Griffiths in The History Boys, which he played twice on tour, on Broadway and in the West End, at Wyndham’s, in 2007.

His first RSC stint climaxed in a dyspeptic, extrovert yet vulnerable Falstaff in both parts of Henry IV (2000), directed by Michael Attenborough, and the other version of Sir John in The Merry Wives of Windsor (2012), where he was a genial, tweedy, cigar-smoking roly-poly of the home counties, cruelly and delightfully derided, by two of the best ever Merry Wives at Stratford, Sylvestra Le Touzel and Alexandra Gilbreath.

He played Humpty Dumpty in a charming Channel 4 TV version of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1998) with Kate Beckinsale as Alice and Siân Phillips as the Red Queen, and the Ghost of Christmas Present in a TV Christmas Carol (1999) starring Patrick Stewart.

Barrit was bulky but light on his feet, at least until diabetes got the better of him and his eyesight was, in the end, impaired by macular degeneration. But he remained indomitably cheerful and generous with his friends and colleagues.

He is survived by Byron and his stepbrother, Michael.

• Desmond Morgan Barrit (Brown), actor, born 19 October 1944; died 21 March 2026