James Laurenson obituary

James Laurenson, who was primarily a stage actor with good grace, authority and a fine baritone voice, who died at the age of 84 after suffering from Parkinson's disease, was a familiar face on television, spanning a brief stint as the Rev. Peter Hope in Coronation Street in 1968 to Sir John Weir, the royal physician, in The Crown (2016).

He had arrived by boat from New Zealand in the early 1960s - as many artists from those islands and Australia did at the time - and in 1964 trod the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and ...