Tall and prematurely bald, Peter Boyle looked like a monk — which is what he once was. Uncomfortable with “living in the Middle Ages”, he gave up the spiritual life to study drama.

While he never fulfilled his boyhood dream of being a Hollywood romantic idol, Boyle played a surprisingly wide range of roles in films and on television, including the Monster in Young Frankenstein (1974), Robert De Niro’s fellow-cabbie, Wizard, in Taxi Driver (1976) and the irascible father in the long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005).

A towering, shiny-domed figure, Boyle was a distinctive presence on screen, from the early 1970s onwards. He could play drama and comedy, villain and hero, and any number of variations in between, from Billy Bob Thornton’s tough, racist father in Monster’s Ball (2001) to the businessman on a trip to Chicago who reveals a surprising vulnerability to Candice Bergen in the poignant little drama A Date with a Lonely Girl (1971).

One of his most memorable scenes — indeed one of the most memorable scenes in cinema — was in the Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein, when, as the Monster, Boyle dons a top hat and tails and proffers a stuttering rendition of Puttin’ on the Ritz, beautifully blending comedy and pathos. Co-star Teri Garr put it succinctly when she said: “He mumbled it in such a way it broke your heart . . . trying so hard.”

Boyle was born in 1935 in Norristown, near Philadelphia, where his father was a children’s television presenter. He served briefly in the US Navy and then joined the Christian Brothers. Boyle talked in one interview of experiencing a youthful crisis in the face of which he felt “you either jump into the river or jump into spirituality”. He found the religious life “too intense” and left after three years, but not without regret: “I felt like I had failed God when I quit being a monk.” There was an inner turmoil about Boyle on which he drew to great effect as an actor.

In the 1960s Boyle spent some time with Chicago’s famous Second City comedy troupe and began appearing in small film roles. His career took off when he played the title role, a working-class bigot, in the drama Joe (1970). It cost about $100,000 and grossed 200 times that in the US. The chance to play Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971) followed but Boyle turned it down because he did not want to be typecast in violent roles; Gene Hackman went on to win an Oscar for the part.

Nevertheless, Boyle established himself both professionally and socially as part of a new, young, politically aware Hollywood elite and regularly landed co-starring roles in significant films. He was Robert Redford’s campaign manager in the 1972 political drama The Candidate and the year after appeared with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland in the crime comedy Steelyard Blues and with Robert Mitchum in the thriller The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

He plays the closest thing that Travis Bickle (De Niro) has to a friend in Taxi Driver, though ultimately they fail completely to connect. Bickle tries hard to communicate his desperation to Wizard, who advises him to get drunk and get laid.

While shooting Young Frankenstein Boyle met his wife Loraine Alterman, a Rolling Stone journalist, and through her he became friends with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who was best man at the couple’s wedding in 1977.

Boyle continued to appear regularly in films and television throughout the 1980s and 1990s and later films include Outland (1981), Red Heat (1988), Malcolm X (1992), The Santa Clause (1994), While You Were Sleeping (1995) and Eddie Murphy’s Doctor Dolittle remake (1998).

He appeared in 200 episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, the CBS sitcom that was broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. He played the title character’s angry, interfering but well-meaning father, who lives across the road. The role brought him seven Emmy nominations, though the only time he won an Emmy was for a guest appearance in The X-Files in 1995.

Boyle is survived by his wife and two daughters.

Peter Boyle, actor, was born on October 18, 1935. He died of heart disease on December 12, 2006, aged 71