It was typical of the Scottish actor Alan MacNaughtan who has died at the age of 82, that on the extensive website dedicated to his film and television credits, no headshot picture is available of him. Alan MacNaughtan by his own admission was an intensely private man.

His idea of a blissful Christmas he once confided to Jackie McGlone in The Herald was to spend it entirely alone, ''having turned down all invitations'', dabbling away at the odd, unfinished painting. By contrast, MacNaughtan's professional side was marked by its ubiquitousness and perfectionism. In a career spanning 50 years he was everywhere, in demand alike from leading classical companies and televsion producers for his particular brand of sardonic elegance which could be effortlessly turned to silky or malevolent effect whether playing kings or schoolmasters, newspaper editors, judges, or scions of the church (ironically, his first calling), Strindberg or Hamish Macbeth.

Late in his career, he brought a striking anguish, for example - part patriotic fervour, part political exasperation - to John of Gaunt's deathbed speech, ''this blessed plot, this England'' in the RSC's 1991 Richard II. (For MacNaughtan there was no inherent conflict of allegiances, despite the Scottish roots. After all, for the staunchly pro-Labour man, in 1991 England/Scotland were indeed under the yoke.)

Equally memorable was his reincarnation of Walter Burns, the archetypal unscrupulous editor in the National Theatre's acclaimed 1972 revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's great newspaper comedy, The Front Page, snarling at Dennis Quilley's hapless reporter, Hildy Johnson: ''Who the hell's gonna read the second paragraph?'' Unforgettable, too, was his appearance in David Thacker's emotionally drenching production of Arthur Miller's The Price at the Young Vic alongside David Calder in the early 1990s.

But many will remember him, back in the 1980s, as Howarth, the crusty schoolmaster in the popular BBC television series set in a pre-war minor public school, To Serve Them All My Days, after which he often lamented, ''television directors wanted me to play schoolmasters until the cows came home''. That MacNaughtan eluded such a fate speaks volumes for his own discernment and the respect with which he was held within the profession.

Born in Bearsden on March 4, 1920, of solid middle-class stock - his father was a respected Glasgow architect - it was early brushes with schoolboy Shakespeare at Glasgow Academy (he had played Portia, Hamlet, Henry V, Hotspur, and Shylock all by the age of 18) that drew MacNaughtan to acting rather than the church, much to his parents' alarm. They should not

have worried.

At RADA in London, he won the coveted Bancroft Gold Medal winner and was immediately plucked by John Gielgud to play the King of France in Gielgud's famous 1940 Old Vic production of King Lear. Almost 40 years on, MacNaughtan's own Lear would be described touchingly as ''a gentle cross between Father Christmas and a Czarist serf''.

In between, and after war service, he shone in seasons at Birmingham Repertory Company, Sheffield, and consolidated his reputation with West End appearances in Chekhov and copper-bottom murder mysteries such as Dial M for Murder.

But it was his phrasing, his gift of expression - a fast dying art - that gave his stage performances their special authority. In 1962, playing Lord Summerhays in a revival of Shaw's Misalliance (Oxford Playhouse, Royal Court, and Criterion) one critic observed ''he paces his lines to languorous perfection''. In 1970, playing the captain in Strindberg's harrowing, battle-of-the-sexes, Dance of Death (Watermill, Newbury, 1970), it was noted that he seemed to penetrate to the very roots of evil, to a point where the dread of death - ''or at any rate the something after death'' - was ''never absent'' from his performance.

After Broadway stints (with Giraudoux's Duel of Angels, John Bowen's After the Rain) and British Council tours with The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream, MacNaughtan appeared as the Bishop of Caerleon in the West End alongside Alec McCowen in Peter Luke's long-running Hadrian the Seventh (Mermaid, 1968) before joining the National Theatre in 1972 where as well as his Walter Burns, he was acclaimed for a ''cool'' Philinte in Tony Harrison's modernised version of Moliere's The Misanthrope (again with McCowen) and a sinister Duke in Jonathan Miller's touring Measure and his first stint at John of Gaunt.

Other roles included Gaev in The Cherry Orchard, Oliver Surface in The School for Scandal, Archie in the premiere of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers and one of the parents of the disturbed boy in Peter Shaffer's Equus (another premiere).

In his twilight years, he was more compelling than ever as Arthur Winslow in Rattigan's The Winslow Boy (Lyric Hammersmith, directed by Michael Rudman), Evans in Edward Bond's The Sea at the National, Don Diego in Corneille's Le Cid, both once more at the National, and All for Love at the Almeida in Islington.

All the time, he was busy too in television where his many supporting roles, including The Duchess of Duke Street, The Sandbaggers, Minder, The Professionals, How Many Miles to Babylon, Strangers and Brothers, Glory Boys, Shadowlands, The Insurance Man, Bergerac, and A Very British Coup to name a few.

His films included Victim, Children of the Damned, Family Life, Last Days of Patton, and Blue Ice.

Alan MacNaughtan, actor; born March 4, 1920, died August 29, 2002.