'A Man for All Seasons' was an actor for all roles

Paul Scofield was the portrait of smooth defiance as Thomas More. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The names are like glittering jewels on Elizabethan velvet - or, if you prefer, half of an ultimate Manchester United 11 - Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness, Scofield. You can argue forever which of the great English actors of the last century was most talented, but there's no argument who among them had the oddest career. It's the least familiar, Paul Scofield, who died yesterday at 86.

How odd? He was surely the only actor ever to have been directed in films by both Peter Brook ("King Lear") and Robert Redford ("Quiz Show"). He was, of course, splendid in both. Scofield is best remembered for his Oscar-winning role as Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons" (1966). It's not a movie that's aged all that well. Too much talk - even more self-congratulation: Robert Bolt's script was one part David Lean to three parts Merchant-Ivory. But Scofield's performance is a marvel of nuanced slyness and pained intelligence.

More's silken defiance can be seen as emblematic of Scofield's career. He lacked the sheer star power of an Olivier or the young Gielgud. But a lack of star power didn't keep Alec Guinness from becoming a major screen presence. Scofield chose a different path: stage work, some TV and radio, and when he did act in a movie he was happy to play in offbeat projects (a 1970 version of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener," for example) or take on non-showy supporting roles. He was the French king in Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" and Judge Danforth in Nicholas Hytner's version of "The Crucible."

Much of Scofield's best work is simply gone. Fortunately, there's the film of the stage Lear he did for Brook, but his other classic theatrical roles survive only in memory. Even some TV performances are impossible to come by. He was amazing - forgive the baldness of the adjective, but that is the precise word - as Lambert Strether in a 1977 BBC adaptation of Henry James' "The Ambassadors": self-aware, shy, blooming, acute but not quite acute enough, a man filled equally with wonder and sorrow. It's a spectacularly calibrated performance, right down to Scofield's pursed-lips American accent. So far as I know, though, there's never been a video or DVD release.

Well, that leaves "A Man for All Seasons," "Lear," "Quiz Show," "Henry V," "The Crucible," a version of Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance," alongside Katharine Hepburn - and, in a lovely reminder of the strange connections film can make, a 2001 PBS documentary about Akira Kurosawa. In it, Scofield (whom we never see) provides the voice-over, reading from Kurosawa's autobiography. It's hard to imagine a stranger pairing than that most robust of great directors and most diffident of great actors. Then again, Scofield would have looked completely at home at the end of Kurosawa's "Ikiru."

"Ikiru" is the story of a dying bureaucrat who devotes the final months of his life to getting a playground built in a slum. It ends with one of the supreme images in the history of cinema: the man sits on a swing, surveying his handiwork, as snow falls. Guinness would have played it for pathos. Richardson would have fussed it into eccentricity. Olivier would have overwhelmed the scene. Gielgud would have been always on the verge of dusting the snow off himself. Scofield, all restrained power and checked melancholy, would have been just right.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.