Timothy Bateson, who has died aged 83, was a character actor of boundless versatility and great warmth of personality who will always be remembered for playing Lucky in the controversial British premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre, London, in 1955. The production, directed by Peter Hall, moved on to the Criterion amid a continuing debate about what the play meant: the actors were no wiser themselves, though Bateson came to love the piece. He delivered his torrential monologue at the end of a rope with a blithe technical perfection, said the critics, and Kenneth Tynan noted that he made anguish sound comic – "a remarkable achievement".
Bateson had already appeared at the Old Vic, in Stratford-on-Avon, and on tour in America with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, but Godot set him up for a busy five decades in theatre, TV and film. His last stage appearance was at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Jonathan Kent's 2007 revival of William Wycherley's The Country Wife, in which he played an amusingly grumpy ancient doorman to Toby Stephens's lascivious Horner, with David Haig as Pinchwife and Patricia Hodge as Lady Fidget.
You could not imagine an actor more suited to playing in Dickens or Shakespeare, for Bateson had a naturally clownish disposition, an expressive moon face and a wonderfully crackling voice that belied a lack of training – just years of practice with the Oxford University Dramatic Society to the Old Vic and beyond. Like TS Eliot's Prufrock, he was an attendant lord, never the lord himself, but he was the perfect gravedigger for Alan Rickman's Hamlet, or indeed Justice Shallow for Simon Callow's Falstaff in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight at Chichester 10 years ago.
Bateson's father was Sir Dingwall Bateson, president of the law society, and his mother, Naomi, was the daughter of Sir Walter Alcock, a famous organist at Salisbury Cathedral and great friend of the composer Edward Elgar. He grew up in the village of Preston, Rutland, and was educated at Lockers Park prep school in Hemel Hempstead and Uppingham School, Rutland, where he won a scholarship to read history at Wadham College, Oxford.
He went straight from Oxford into Alberto Cavalcanti's unfairly overlooked 1947 film of Nicholas Nickleby, scripted by John Dighton, with a galaxy of British stars such as Sybil Thorndike, Cedric Hardwicke, Stanley Holloway and Bernard Miles. His cameo as Lord Verisopht prepared the ground for later BBC television Dickens appearances in Bleak House, Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield, in which he scuttled around as the eccentric, knife-bearing Mr Dick. He made his stage debut with the Old Vic in 1948 in Twelfth Night, and at Stratford over the next two years played small roles in productions by Tyrone Guthrie, Michael Benthall and Peter Brook. The latter's Measure for Measure, with John Gielgud and Barbara Jefford, restored the play to the modern repertoire, and he also appeared in Gielgud's 1950 King Lear.
With the Oliviers in New York he made up the numbers in the Antony, Caesar and Cleopatra plays by Shakespeare and Shaw, returning for a season to the St James's in London. The parts improved at the Old Vic in 1953, where he was ideally cast as both Osric in Richard Burton's Hamlet and Trinculo in The Tempest. He was the ostler in Olivier's great Richard III movie in 1955 and over the subsequent two decades was a regular member of the BBC Radio repertory company while making a mark in films as diverse as Jack Arnold's The Mouse That Roared (1959) with Peter Sellers and Jean Seberg, Bryan Forbes's The Wrong Box (1966) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore – he was a funny little, very nasal, legal clerk – and Peter Collinson's The Italian Job (1969) with Michael Caine and Noël Coward.
More recently he popped up in Mike Leigh's All Or Nothing (2002) with Timothy Spall, Charles Dance's Ladies in Lavender (2004) with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist (2005) and as the voice of Kreacher in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007).
Bateson's stage career was no less eclectic, ranging in the West End from the American musical The Fantasticks at the Apollo in 1961 to the courtroom drama Difference of Opinion at the Garrick in 1963 and the classic comedy The Clandestine Marriage with the peerless Alastair Sim in his last stage performance (Bateson took over Sim's role at the matinees) at the Savoy in 1975.
Jonathan Miller cast him as Firs in The Cherry Orchard at the Sheffield Crucible two years ago, with Joanna Lumley as Ranevskaya, just before he played in The Country Wife, and his other notable stage work included appearances in Yukio Ninagawa's beautiful production of Tango at the End of Winter, again with Rickman, at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1991, and as yet another butler in Franco Zeffirelli's version of Pirandello's Absolutely (Perhaps) with Joan Plowright at the Wyndham's in 2003.
Both he and his wife, the former actor Sheila Shand Gibbs, whom he met while nursing half a pint in a drinking club and married in 1953, were committed Christians, which precluded, as far as he was concerned, making adverts for alcohol or cigarettes. He lived an almost model family life in Barnes and Surbiton, having peaked as a sportsman when coxing the Wadham crew in Eights Week just after the second world war.
He is survived by Sheila, their three children, Elizabeth, Andrew and Caroline, and by an elder sister, Ann.