Star of stage and screen Stephen Moore, 81

Stage actor Stephen Moore, who has died aged 81, will be remembered mostly for voicing a robot – the paranoid android Marvin in the original radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

Douglas Adams’ comedy science-fiction adventure began in 1978 and Moore stayed with it through four more series, the television show (still just the voice), the records and the audio books.

In a general sense, he was the voice of the show, as he picked off other roles when something different was needed – these included a mouse, a whale, and the ruler of the universe – and recorded the entire run of Hitchhiker books, on his own, for EMI.

But even just vocally his range was considerable, as demonstrated in his regular appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, or his leading roles in radio versions of Madame Bovary Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

Then again, on television, where he was first noted in a 1962 version of Jean Anouilh’s Dinner With The Family – “and introducing Stephen Moore” read the cast list headed by Jeremy Brett and Renée Houston – he was as adept in comedy as he was in classic serials.

In the 1980s, he was Felicity Kendal’s live-in boyfriend in the first series of Solo written by Carla Lane (his character was thrown out for sleeping with Kendal’s best friend), Adrian Mole’s dad in two series of Sue Townsend’s saga and David Lodge’s flustered academic Philip Swallow in Small World.

Later, he appealed to wider audiences as Kevin’s dad in Harry Enfield And Chums and as Eldane, the scaly-skinned leader of the Silurians in Doctor Who. To many of these roles he brought the same brand of casual insouciance that became his trademark over three decades at both the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

He was as much at home, and as charmingly revelatory, in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn as he was in those of Sam Shepard, David Hare and Howard Brenton.

At the National he featured significantly in Hare’s brilliant Plenty (1978) and Brenton’s controversial The Romans In Britain (1980).

Moore was married four times, thrice divorced. He had three children – Robyn, Guy and Hedda – with his first wife, Barbara Mognaz; one, Charlotte, with his second, Celestine Randall; and another, Sophie, with his fourth wife, Noelyn George, who survives him, as do his children.

Stephen Moore was famous for voicing Marvin.