Ian Richardson was a founder member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and during some 15 years at Stratford established himself as one of Britain’s leading Shakespearean actors, with among many others, memorable portrayals of Coriolanus, Prospero and the two Richards, II and III.

His performances were marked by extraordinary vocal precision, clipped and deliberate, physical elegance and a striking presence. After so many years as a company member he diversified into commercial theatre and built virtually a new career in television, crowned by his cynical, wheedling and ruthlessly ambitious politician, Francis Urquhart, in House of Cards.

Urquhart is first seen as a government chief whip but with his eye firmly on the top job. The drama, which went out in 1990 at the time of Mrs Thatcher’s demise, was adapted from Michael Dobbs’s novel by Andrew Davies, who gave Richardson, in one of his frequent asides to camera, a catchphrase which resonated long afterwards: “You may think that: I couldn’t possibly comment”.

Having schemed his way into No 10, murdering his mistress along the way, Urquhart reappeared in To Play the King (1993), where he found himself at odds with a liberal monarch, played by Michael Kitchen with the voice and mannerisms of the Prince of Wales. In a third tale, The Final Cut (1995), Urquhart’s dishonourable past finally undermines and destroys him.

Seen by millions on television, Urquhart suddenly made Richardson, hitherto known to a smaller and more specialised audience as a fine classical actor, into a star. It was, as he admitted, a mixed blessing. He was recognised wherever he went, even during a holiday in Naples, and had to stop going to the Garrick Club because real politicians fell silent when he approached the bar.

Ian William Richardson was born in Edinburgh in 1934. His father, who was a manager in a biscuit factory, was a strict and austere Presbyterian who strongly disapproved of his son’s choice of profession, but was eventually reconciled to it and took pleasure in his success. From schools in Tyne-castle and Edinburgh Richardson went to the University of Glasgow before training for the stage at the Glasgow College of Dramatic Art.

In 1958 he joined the Bir-mingham Repertory Theatre, where he had several leading roles including, at the callow age of 24, Hamlet.

Two years later he moved to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, soon to become the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Stratford-upon-Avon. During the first controversial but halcyon years of the new company, as a young actor without much previous experience, he was catapulted by Peter Hall,

its founding director, into a series of big and totally different classic roles: among them Aguecheek, Oberon, Edmund in King Lear and the Antipho-lus of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors.

The risk was justified. Richardson rose to the challenge. His achievement was made no easier by the unnerving amount of media attention focused on everything the emerging RSC then did as it developed a new aesthetic in Stratford linked for the first time to modern work in London.

To the public who throughout the Sixties saw the company’s historic productions, Richardson and his colleague Ian Holm eventually held undisputed positions as the young Turks of Britain’s classical stage. But the dangers of overexposure in Shakespeare, and of becoming too familiar to audiences, worried them both increasingly.

By the time Richardson finally broke from the RSC in 1975 he had turned 40 and played more than 30 demanding roles, a number of them not only in Britain but in the US, including three visits to New York, continental Europe, the USSR and Japan.

In many he revealed a blazing yet contained energy rooted in a nerviness and flam-boyance that he had gradually learnt to control. His anxiety before going on stage was at one time so intense he regularly vomited in his dressing room washbasin. But a nervous breakdown in 1973 forced him to slow down, come to terms with his painful apprehensions and to “regard acting as a friend instead of a monster”.

During his near decade and a half with the RSC his frenetic, insanely jealous Ford in Terry Hands’s The Merry Wives of Windsor must rank as one of the funniest of modern times, made so partly because he gave the character an unshakeable conviction that his behaviour was perfectly reasonable.

Richardson was proudest of his blonde, wiry, neurotic Coriolanus for John Barton. Barton also directed him and Richard Pasco in a Richard II where they alternated the roles of the King and Bolingbroke, vividly demonstrating how radically different can be any two actors in the same part. This was a fascinating insight into the art of the performer, and one which also established a lasting off-stage friendship between the two men.

Modern roles for the RSC which he made his own included two in a single legendary production: the Herald, and later Marat, in Peter Weiss’s The Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook. But the company gave him few opportunities to appear in contemporary plays, to “share a stage with a telephone or two”.

He was partly the victim of his gifts as a superb classical actor. This was probably the main reason why he eventually tore himself away from ensemble work to seek the jostling insecurity of films, television, and the commercial theatre.

While claiming he was “not a matinee idol like Rex Harrison”, he nonetheless had a remarkable (and award-win-ning) success in New York in 1976 as Professor Higgins in a rhapsodically received production of My Fair Lady. This was its first full-scale revival since the premiere of the musical, with Harrison as Higgins, 20 years earlier.

Richardson made an impact in a Canadian Shaw festival as Jack Tanner, and as the Doctor in The Millionaires s. Returning to London he acted at the Old Vic at Khlestakov in The Government Inspector and as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. In 1981 came another success on Broadway, in Lolita with Donald Sutherland as Humbert Humbert.

He was seen less on the stage in later years but during the 1990s he gave two outstanding performances at Chichester, as Moliãre’s The Miser and Pine-ro’s The Magistrate, the latter production transferring to the West End. In 2006, in one of his last stage roles, he was a memorable Sir Epicure Mammon in a modern version of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist at the National Theatre.

He had done much good work for the small screen before House of Cards, notably as Haydon in a stellar cast headed by Alec Guinness, in John le Carré’s dense and enigmatic thriller, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He was with Guinness again in Graham Greene’s Monsieur Quixote, played The Master in Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue and was the disgraced spy Anthony Blunt in Blunt.

After finishing with Francis Urquhart, and anxious to move on from him, he was Lord Groan in a flamboyant adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s fantasy Gormenghast and in 2005 played the chancellor in charge of the interminable Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case in a memorable BBC adaptation of Dickens’s Bleak House.

The cinema was never his main outlet but he had character parts in a number of films and lent authority to such roles as the Priest in Man of La Man-cha, Montgomery in Ike — The War Years, and Sherlock Holm-es in The Hound of the Basker-villes. In 1987 he supported Pierce Brosnan and Michael Caine in the political thriller, The Fourth Protocol.

To meet, Richardson was articulate, outgoing, even effusive. But behind that was a fastidious and somewhat private Scot. The contrast fed into his acting a powerful tension. Alongside this was always a vein of glinting irony and, if needed, a wonderful ability to make audiences laugh — without which, Olivier once said, no actor can effectively play tragedy. Away from acting his favourite pastime was looking round old churches. He was appointed CBE in 1979.

In 1961 he married Marous-sia Frank, a fellow actor. Their elder son Jeremy, when 8 years old, played Mamillius in Trevor Nunn's A Winter’s Tale at Stratford. Their other son Miles, when 7, played a fairy in Peter Hall’s RSC film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which his father was Oberon. Miles followed Richardson into the acting profession and Jeremy became a graphic designer.

His wife and sons survive him.

Ian Richardson, CBE, actor, was born on April 7, 1934. He died on February 9, 2007, aged 72