Few actors can claim to have played most of Shakespeare's clowns and made some of them funny, but Geoffrey Hutchings, who has died of meningitis aged 71, did just that. An associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he played Launce, Bottom, Feste, one of the Dromios and even the impossible Lavache in Trevor Nunn's great "Crimean war" All's Well That Ends Well, with Peggy Ashcroft making her RSC farewell as the Countess of Rousillon. Hutchings brought an individual quality of asperity and crackle to everything he did, and was noted early on as a character actor of uncommon personality: small, slight, but always ferocious, he was like a terrier with a dangerous bark.
He grasped Autolycus, for instance, that wandering snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, in Ronald Eyre's 1981 The Winter's Tale at Stratford-upon-Avon, and transformed him into a Chaplinesque tramp with a deliciously unlikely repertoire of Victorian parlour songs. In 1982 he won a Swet (Society of West End Theatres) award for his hilarious Lady Dodo, swanning around on a white elephant, in Terry Hands's brilliant RSC Barbican production of Poppy, a satirical 19th-century pantomime by Peter Nichols and Monty Norman.
Latterly, Hutchings was known to millions as the sun-bed tycoon Mel Harvey in ITV's popular sitcom Benidorm, in which he starred from 2008. He was due to film another series of Benidorm, and had also completed work on a new BBC2 sitcom, Grandma's House, written by comedian Simon Amstell. Over the years, he was a familiar face on Heartbeat, Casualty, Foyle's War, Holby City and Our Friends in the North.
He was born in Dorchester, Dorset, the only child of a town clerk, and was educated at the Thomas Hardye school. He won a scholarship to study French and physical education at Birmingham University before training for the stage at Rada. He made his West End debut at Her Majesty's theatre in 1963, in Richard Rodgers's No Strings, a groundbreaking musical with an inter-racial love story.
After spending a few years in rep, he joined the RSC in 1968 and, in his first few seasons, played Octavius Caesar, the Pandar in Pericles, Peter Simple in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Pisanio in Cymbeline; by the time he played an explosive Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1980, followed by an obscenely enthusiastic Bottom, he was an RSC institution, in the best sense of the word: funny, familiar, reliable. He returned to the company in 1990 as Cap'n Andy in their collaboration with Opera North on the musical Show Boat.
Hutchings appeared at the National theatre in two American comedy classics directed by Jonathan Lynn in the mid-1980s, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, and Three Men On a Horse. He played the lead in both: a Jewish Mr Fixit, Jacobowsky, scrambling through the fall of Paris in 1940; and Erwin Trowbridge, a dreamy suburban greetings card versifier with a gift for picking winners, who gets caught up in a gambling syndicate. All of Hutchings's talent for clownish serenity were on show here, and it seemed like a star-making performance as the play transferred to the West End.
The breakthrough never quite happened. He drew more rave reviews at the National 10 years later as the comedian Sid James in Terry Johnson's Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick. The play charted Sid's backstage affair with Barbara Windsor (unforgettably played by Samantha Spiro); with his leer and creased-up features, Hutchings did more than conform to Hattie Jacques's description of James as a dissipated walnut.
His films included Clockwise (1986), with a script by Michael Frayn, starring John Cleese; Wish You Were Here (1987), Emily Lloyd's auspicious debut; Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989); White Hunter Black Heart (1990), Clint Eastwood's thinly veiled account of the making of John Huston's The African Queen; and Thomas Vinterberg's sci-fi romance, It's All About Love (2002), with Joaquin Phoenix and Claire Danes.
Hutchings's final stage appearance was in last year's theatrical premiere of The Shawshank Redemption at the Wyndham's, in which he memorably played the old prison librarian. He left several other imperishable impressions in the West End: as the dustbin-bound Nagg in Beckett's Endgame, with Michael Gambon and Lee Evans, in 2004; as a worn-out suburban husband and father in Peter Gill's exquisite 2005 revival of John Osborne and Anthony Creighton's Epitaph for George Dillon; and as a gentlemanly Herr Schultz in Rufus Norris's contentious revival of Cabaret, wooing Sheila Hancock with a pineapple.
He made his home in Gloucestershire for many years but also lived with his second wife, Andi Godfrey, in the same house in Westbourne Grove, west London, as the producer Thelma Holt, who had introduced the couple. He is survived by Andi and three children by his first wife.