Widely remembered for his excessive corpulence on stage and television, Willoughby Goddard spent over 40 years never trying to disguise it. It brought him authority, variety, monotony and joy. Whether he was genial or aggressive, alarming or soothing, he could be cast in all sorts of moods. Sometimes he played up self-consciously to his weightiness; sometimes it hardly mattered. He could play judges, professors, mayors, landlords, managing directors and chairmen; he could also play sundry characters of no importance whatever.

Willoughby Goddard was born in Bicester, Oxfordshire, in 1926, He made his first appearance on the stage at the Oxford Playhouse in 1943 as The Steward in Shaw's Saint Joan. After a period in repertory, especially the Bristol Old Vic, he first appeared in London at the Arts Theatre under Esme Percy's direction as Horngolloch in James Bridie's Gog and Magog (1948). At the Royal Court in 1952 he acted Attwater, the evangelist, with what a critic called “an unction worthy of Robert Morley” in Donald Pleasence's Ebb Tide, adapted from the story by Robert Louis Stevenson.

He was the the bulky Mr Holmes in Jack Roffey's whodunnit, No Other Verdict (Duchess, 1954), and as the “massive vulgarian” Gowing in The Diary of a Nobody (Arts), six chapters of the book by George and Weedon Grossmith, Goddard was able to “talk to his hosts with conviction” in a show adapted by Basil Dean and Richard Blake.

On television he created first a fine impression as Professor Mark Harrison in The Voices; and in the Adventures of William Tell he put the shivers up watchers as the hero's splendidly weighty main protagonist.

As Sir Jason Tovey in The Mind of Mr Reeder he was well cast; and as the monstrous Lord Charley, who sought artistic grants from Hattie Jacques as Miss Manger, it was said that “he knew his business”.

With Charlie Drake in Drake's Progress Goddard found a strong sense of fun, and one of his last appearances was as Professor Siblington, last seen watching from the elegant spires of an English college in Porterhouse Blue (1987).

Meanwhile, in the theatre, he was wonderfully effective in Dickens, Shakespeare, The Lily-White Boys, Jorrocks and other revues and musical comedies. Goddard played a cousin, a bootlegger, in the strangely moving scene in a hotel bedroom of the 1930s in an adaptation by Denis Cannan and Pierre Bost for Peter Brook's production of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory.

In 1960 at the Royal Court he took two parts in Harry Cookson's revue-like entertainment, The Lily-White Boys. Representing law and order and pomposity amid the songs of Christopher Logue, he played the chairman of the committee and the managing director. In that same year, as the imposing Cardinal Wolsey in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, Goddard found a part which brought out fully his dignified weight. He was described by Caryl Brahms as the “fleshliest Cardinal in the business”, and Brahms wished to know where Goddard was during the casting of a film of Oscar Wilde. He would have suited it better.

In 1963 on Broadway in the hit Oliver! Goddard's Mr Bumble was “wonderfully fat and bullish”, and back in England on tour he played Sir in The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd.

As Marmaduke Mulleygrubs, JP, in the jovial if otherwise inadequate Victorian musical Jorrocks (New Theatre, then Albery and now Noël Coward) Goddard did all he could but it was not enough.

His happiest Shakespearean part was as Sir Toby Belch, again, with Prospect Productions in Twelfth Night in 1968. He claimed in an interview to have lost eight inches round the middle “after a complaint he caught in Cairo” though there was no sign of it.

In 1969 (still for Prospect Productions) as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair Goddard landed himself in the stocks with Justice Overdo (Sebastian Shaw) and the pedantic Wasp (Clifford Rose). He then played a sinister Pandar in Shakespeare's Pericles, and Presumption and Giant Despair in The Pilgrim's Progress.

As Turgenev's Bolshintsov in A Month in the Country (Chichester, 1974) Goddard was attractive enough as the rich old neighbouring landowner to attract Vera; and as the enormous First Shepherd in Oedipus Tyrannus his extra weight counted for less.

At Christmas he played Col Guldberg in Hans Andersen (Palladium); and in 1977 (Apollo) he was “the theatre's man-mountain”, in Shut Your Eyes and Think of England, that is to say, Sir Frederick, who loomed owlishly over Donald Sinden as a sort of financier.

At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1979-80 he returned to Toby Belch in Twelfth Night for whose drunkenness his niece was ready to dispatch him to an old people's home, but the pleasure of his voice when he was “merely murmuring” struck a critic as remarkable.

As the altogether more orderly, though vast, Duke of Venice to Sinden's Othello, Goddard gave one of his best examples of Stratford-upon-Avon teamwork.

At the Old Vic in 1984, in a revival of John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Goddard was the pot-bellied mayor of a strike-bound English northern town.

Willoughby Goddard is survived by his wife, Ann Phillips, and their son.

Willoughby Goddard, actor, was born on July 4, 1926. He died on April 11, 2008, aged 81