Obituary: Peter Vaughan

Peter Vaughan, a British character actor who often played rogues early in his career but was more familiar to recent audiences as a wise, blind mentor on the fantasy series Game of Thrones, has died, aged 93.

Craggy-visaged and imposing, Vaughan was a regular in films and on British television for more than 50 years.

Despite appearing in only a few episodes of Porridge (1974-77), Vaughan put his wide frame and deep tones to such comically menacing effect as "Genial" Harry Grout, the HM Slade Prison godfather, that he became a stand-out character. Two decades later, he touchingly portrayed an elderly trade unionist in Peter Flannery's political epic Our Friends in the North (1996).

As Maester Aemon, in Game of Thrones, adapted from George RR Martin's novels, he forsakes his royal heritage, giving up the chance to rule the seven kingdoms of Westeros to serve in the Night's Watch, a group of warriors and criminals tasked with defending a colossal wall to protect lands to the south from invaders from the north.

Maester Aemon was a fatherly figure to Jon Snow, who becomes the Watch's leader and, unlike many in Martin's treacherous, violent world, Maester Aemon dies of old age in Season 5, in 2015. Vaughan also played a manipulative British spy in The Naked Runner (1967), with Frank Sinatra; one of the English villagers who harass Dustin Hoffman and Susan George in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971); and a bureaucrat in Terry Gilliam's dystopian satire Brazil (1985), which starred Jonathan Pryce and featured Robert De Niro.

Charles Dickens

He played other elderly figures, including Anthony Hopkins's ailing father in James Ivory's film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1993) and a cantankerous old man in the farce Death at a Funeral (2007), which also featured his Game of Thrones co-star Peter Dinklage.

He was born Peter Olm in 1923, in Wem, Shropshire, England. He joined a repertory company at 16, but was drafted into the military in 1942. He continued his stage acting career in England after the war, and during the 1950s he met and married actress Billie Whitelaw, who became known for her work with Samuel Beckett. They divorced in the 1960s. On television he appeared in several BBC miniseries based on Charles Dickens's novels, including Oliver Twist (1962) and Bleak House (1985), and in an adaptation of Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 1980. He went on to appear in the 1996 film version of that play, which starred Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Vaughan later married actor Lillias Walker. He said he was grateful that he had chosen a profession that allowed him to work well into old age. "It's not the sort of career where you have to retire at a given age," he told Shropshire magazine in 2007. "I compare it to being a painter or a professional musician – as long as you're fit and healthy to carry on, and the offers come in, you just keep going."

He is survived by his wife, Lillias Walker Vaughan; his son, David; two stepdaughters, Alex and Vikki; and four grandchildren.

– New York Times Service