British stage and screen actor John Wood died in his sleep 6 August 2011. Born in Derbyshire, England, on 1 January 1930, he was named a CBE in 2007. He won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in Travesties, was nominated for the same award the preceding year for his starring role in Sherlock Holmes, and nominated for the 1968 Tony for Featured Actor for his role in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. On screen, he earned nominations for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Dr. Stephen Falken in WarGames (1983), shared a cast nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Chocolat (2000).
He studied law at Oxford, but fell into theatre when he directed and starred in a student production of Richard III. After school, he performed Shakespeare with the Old Vic Company in London. He was a part of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s, and also performed off and on in the States (he replaced Ian McKellen as Salieri in Amadeus on Broadway in 1981). He also started appearing on television and in film in the 1950s. His career continued in all three media almost through the present.
His genre roles include: The Little Vampire (2000), Ladyhawke (1985), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), WarGames (1983), Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Doomwatch (1971), and Out of the Unknown (1966). He and Patrick Macnee are the only two actors to appear in both The Avengers television series (1961) and the subsequent film adaptation The Avengers (1998).
He is survived by his second wife, Sylvia Vaughan, whom he married in 1977, along with their three children, and one child from his first marriage.