Douglas Campbell began his career as a teenager at the Old Vic in London. He rose from stagehand to playing Othello in little over a decade and in effect married into British theatre royalty when he wed the daughter of his sometime co-star Dame Sybil Thorndike. But it was in Canada that he enjoyed his greatest successes.

He stayed on after being invited by Tyrone Guthrie to appear in his new Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, and became a key figure at Stratford. He was also co-founder, manager, director and star of the Canadian Players, which toured classic and contemporary plays. He lived for a while in the United States and also had a period back in England, but he eventually took Canadian citizenship in 1990.

A big man, with an equally big voice, he was compared to Orson Welles and after his death was variously described as a “legend” and a “theatre great” by the Canadian press.

Douglas Campbell was born in Glasgow in 1922, the son of a postal inspector and a typist who was also an amateur actress. Campbell followed in their footsteps in becoming a vegetarian, a socialist and a pacifist, and was reputedly expelled from school for refusing to wear his gas mask during air-raid practice. He hitchhiked to London and joined the Old Vic as a stage hand and bit-part actor.

He went on to appear with Dame Sybil and her husband Sir Lewis Casson in 1941 productions of Medea and Jacob’s Ladder, and in 1947 he was married to their daughter, the actress Ann Casson. Campbell had returned to Scotland by then. Between 1945 and 1950 he was a member of the Citizens Theatre Company in Glasgow. He had a second stint with the Old Vic and then headed for Canada, appearing in the festival’s inaugural production of Richard III (1953), with Alec Guinness.

Campbell was best known for his theatre work, though he also appeared in films and television, starring in the series The Great Detective (1979-82), a sort of Canadian spin on Sherlock Holmes, based on the real-life Scottish émigré John Wilson Murray.

Ann Casson died in 1990, and Campbell then married the actress Moira Wylie, who survives him, along with his six children.

Douglas Campbell, actor, was born on June 11, 1922. He died on October 6, 2009, aged 87