HAVING lit up Noël Coward’s postwar revue Sigh No More with a nostalgic song, Matelot, in 1945, Graham Payn, an unknown actor and singer, became a talent worth attention. The ditty oozed nostalgia. It was also tuneful.

The revue was not one of Coward’s best, but the memory of Payn’s exquisite and graceful delivery in the spotlight of the haunting song stayed with all who saw it.

Known mainly until then as a figure in male chorus lines, having started out as Curly in Peter Pan at the Palladium at the age of 13 and having appeared in an earlier Coward revue a year later, Payn had also been in numerous pantomimes and musical comedies before and during the Second World War until his pleasant voice and presence filled the air in Sigh No More.

As Beverley Baxter put it in the Evening Standard: “Mr Graham Payn shows that he can do something more than dance in tails and white tie.” What that something was would puzzle Coward for the rest of his life.

For he wanted Payn, a devoted friend, to make his theatrical mark; but he was content to be a character actor and that seems to have been the limit to his ambition.

Coward hoped for more. He wrote parts for him in his next two West End musical comedies, Pacific 1860 and Ace of Clubs. Under Coward’s tutelage, Payn would play in regular plays as well as musicals. And as the years rolled by he also co-directed or directed Coward shows.

Yet if he was not made of the stuff that Coward was made of, and if he lacked the restlessness which governed Coward’s career, Payn’s devotion was unquestionable. When, many years later, Coward was behaving with his customary wit and elegance after encountering Kenneth Tynan at the Savoy Grill, the critic noted when Coward made as if to go how he depended on Payn and another old friend, Joyce Carey, to each take an arm as Coward left the Grill at a snail’s pace.

Having edited with Sheridan Morley The Noël Coward Diaries, Payn ended up running Coward’s estate in Switzerland.

Graham Payn was born at Pietermaritzburg, in Natal, South Africa, and was educated there, and privately in England. He first appeared in films as a boy soprano in 1932 when he was 14.

His first grown-up role on stage in London came with Patricia Burke only a fortnight before the outbreak of the war in Douglas Furber’s song-and-dance show Sitting Pretty (Prince’s, now Shaftesbury).

With Binnie Hale and Leslie Henson he played in another musical, Up and Doing (Saville, 1940) before Fine and Dandy, again with Henson, at the same theatre. In Magic Carpet (Prince’s) he was with Sydney Howard and then after The Lilac Domino (His Majesty’s, 1944) he turned up at the Palace that year as Lewis Carroll, the Mock Turtle and Tweedledum in Clemence Dane’s version of Alice in Wonderland with music by Richard Addinsell before yet another Leslie Henson revue, Gaieties (Winter Garden).

Then came Coward’s Sigh No More. Pleased with Payn’s success, Coward wrote into Pacific 1860 (Drury Lane, 1946) the major part of a handsome South Seas islander who falls for Mary Martin as a visiting singer of note.

As the elder son of the principal planter on the island, Payn had eventually to yield his passion to his brother; but the ability to project emotion was clear and affecting.

As Harold Hobson remarked, he spoke “with beautiful sincerity a toast to the natural human desire for the enduringness of affection. This is only a small moment in the play. But it is one worth waiting for.”

In 1947-48 Payn toured the United States in the parts which Coward had created with Gertrude Lawrence in Tonight at 8.30. Under Coward’s direction he played opposite Lawrence again, and the tour flourished though the revival flopped on Broadway.

Back in London Payn then joined Coward’s slightly desperate evocation of the London underworld in Ace of Clubs (Cambridge) before returning to his first love, intimate song-and-dance in West End revue.

After the successful Lyric Revue (1951) at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he appeared in the Globe Revue; and he returned to Coward in 1954 in what became — because Coward had inflated it — the leading role of Mr Hopper in After the Ball (Globe), a musical version of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, with an affecting, nostalgic song called Faraway Land.

Though Payn was admirable enough as Mr Hopper, Coward’s version was not admired. In an adaptation from the French of a musical comedy by those bright revue talents Diana Morgan and Robert MacDermott called Love is News at a small London outpost of experiment, the New Watergate, Payn shared the lead with Patricia Cree (who had been his partner in the Wilde musical).

Under Norman Marshall’s direction they made a real success of it, though the show failed to transfer.

However, it did lead to a television contract with Richard Hearne of Mr Pastry fame, though Coward dismissed this opportunity as “unsuitable”.

Turning to legitimate roles, Payn did a stint at Windsor rep. He also revived the play he had first acted in the US — Tonight at 8.30 — and then turned up as a detective (echoes of The Ace of Clubs) in a thriller, Subway in the Sky.

Even so, Coward fretted about his young friend’s sense of achievement. He knew that he had been good in facing up to various rebuffs, but he seemed frustratingly content with so little.

Then Payn ventured into another legitimate play, Paul Tabori’s Brouhaha (Aldwych, 1959), which Coward rated “a great success”. In that same season Payn played opposite Margaret Lockwood and Yolande Donlan in Jack Popplewell’s And Suddenly it’s Spring; and Coward included a part for him in his next piece, about a retirement home for actors Waiting in the Wings (Duke of York’s, 1960).

Four years later Coward appointed him assistant director in both New York and London of a musical version (not by Coward) of Blithe Spirit. As High Spirits, however, the musical comedy merely depressed the spirits of onlookers. It ran briefly at the Savoy.

The following season Coward cast him as Morris Dix in a revival of Coward’s Present Laughter (Queen’s) headed by Nigel Patrick, Phyllis Calvert and Richard Briers. Though Payn acted well enough, Coward declared him to be “a born drifter”.

“He sleeps and sleeps, and the days go by. I love him dearly and for ever, but this lack of drive in any direction is a bad augury for the future. I am willing and happy to look after him for the rest of my life, but he must do something.

“If only he would take up some occupation and stick to it. I know that he is unhappy inside but, alas, with his natural resilience these moments of self-revelation dissipate and on go the years, and he will be an elderly man who has achieved nothing at all.

“He has had many chances and failed. He knows this, of course, and I am sure that he has many miserable moments, but he won’t work unless he has to — then he is at it like a tiger — but he lacks the selfdiscipline to force himself . . . He hasn’t pressed on with learning to type. He only reads trash and that very seldom.”

After Coward died in Jamaica in 1973 Payn wrote, with Sheridan Morley and Cole Lesley, Noël Coward and His Friends (1979).

He dedicated to Lesley The Noël Coward Diaries, which were published in 1982, and settled at Coward’s last home in Switzerland, Les Avants.

Graham Payn, actor, was born on April 25, 1918. He died on November 4, 2005, aged 87.