With a voice that could command as easily as it could charm, lounge-lizard good looks and a sturdy physicality, his 70-year career also included spells as a matinee idol and a star of schlock horrors, and even saw him turn down the role James Bond.

Of his many Shakespearean roles, it was Mark Antony with which he was most strongly associated. He played the part three times for the RSC; in Trevor Nunn’s 1972 cycle of the Roman plays he played the role both to Corin Redgrave’s Julius Caesar and to Janet Suzman’s Cleopatra. He then made an unlikely return to it in 1993, in John Caird’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Clare Higgins, almost 30 years his junior, was his energetic lover.