Charles Keating, who has died aged 72 after a long illness, was a distinguished and dashing actor on Broadway and with the Royal Shakespeare Company – forming part of the maverick director Buzz Goodbody's company at The Other Place, the alternative RSC venue she launched at Stratford-upon-Avon in the early 1970s – before finding fame and fortune in American television daytime soaps.
The most prominent of these soaps was NBC's Another World, the channel's highest-rated daytime drama, in which Keating played Carl Hutchins, a reformed villain knocking around the lives and intrigues, domestic and commercial, of suburban society in the Midwestern town of Bay City; Keating served two major stints in the 1980s and 90s in a series that ran for 35 years, receiving four Daytime Emmy nominations and the best actor award in 1996.
By then, his full head of dark hair had become a full mane of white, which only set off his dark eyes and Irish good looks to better effect. Between those stints, he also featured in CBS's 1980s daytime soap Fresno as a hapless chauffeur to the Kensington family, who owned a Californian raisin-growing empire going to seed. The comedian Carol Burnett was the widowed matriarch in this parody of prime-time soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty.
Keating was born in London of Irish Catholic extraction to Charles James Keating and his wife Margaret (nee Shevlin) and was educated at Wandsworth Technical College before the family moved to Canada, where he completed his schooling in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He made his stage debut at the Buffalo Studio Theatre in Buffalo, New York, in 1959 and then acted with the Charles Playhouse Company in Boston and the Provincetown Playhouse in Cleveland, Ohio.
His career took off at the Minnesota Theatre (later the Guthrie) in Minneapolis, where he played Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Caliban in The Tempest. His next two roles were in productions – Brecht's Arturo Ui (he was Giri) and Sophocles' House of Atreus trilogy (as Pylades) – that transferred from Minnesota to the Billy Rose Theatre on Broadway; his New York debut came in December 1968.
He returned to Britain in 1971, joining the newly built Sheffield Crucible as both actor and director. His role as Thomas Cromwell in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons at the Bankside Globe (the early model for Sam Wanamaker's Globe) in 1972 propelled him towards the RSC, where he played Oliver in Goodbody's 1973 As You Like It with Eileen Atkins as Rosalind and Maureen Lipman as Celia.
In the following RSC season, he played Edmund (and arranged the fights) for Goodbody's heavily cut King Lear, mounted in The Other Place before launching on a schools tour; Tony Church was Lear, David Suchet the Fool. Also in Stratford in 1974 he appeared in John Barton's Cymbeline playing Cloten – who lost his head, literally, as well as metaphorically – to Susan Fleetwood's luminous Imogen, with Tim Pigott-Smith as Posthumus, Ian Richardson as Iachimo and Suchet as Pisanio.
His American soap status was prefigured when he appeared in a pilot episode of Crown Court in 1972, and he picked up his television career after the RSC in two prestigious series: first, as Wallis Simpson's former husband, Ernest, in Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), starring Edward Fox and Cynthia Harris; and then as Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited (1981) with Jeremy Irons, Diana Quick, Laurence Olivier and Anthony Andrews.
It was probably the impression he made as Evelyn Waugh's morally suspect and philandering Rex that recommended him to the American television chiefs. After Another World and Fresno, he made a short-lived sitcom, Going to Extremes, also for ABC, played an evil psychiatrist, Dr Damon Lazare, on another soap, All My Children, and made guest appearances on Miami Vice and Sex in the City. He found a new fan base, too, as the great god Zeus in the cult cod-mythological series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001).
Stage appearances were now sporadic. He was nominated for a Tony in a Broadway revival of Joe Orton's Loot in 1986 (the production originated off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club), appeared in readings and two-handers with his Another World co-star Victoria Wyndham, and returned to the Guthrie in Minnesota in the American premiere of Brian Friel's beautiful valedictory play about Irish Home Rule, The Home Place, in 2007.
His performances in movies included Klingman in The Bodyguard (1992), Golchan in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair with Piers Brosnan, and as Gian-Carlo in comedian Rob Schneider's Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005).
Keating enjoyed a long marriage to Mary Ellen Cudbody and is survived by her and their two sons.
• Charles Keating, actor, born 22 October 1941; died 9 August 2014
• This article was amended on 19 August 2014. The original stated that "he picked up his television career after the RSC in two prestigious BBC series". Neither Edward and Mrs Simpson nor Brideshead Revisited was made by the BBC. This has been corrected.
