Ken Campbell, who died on 31 August, 2008, was an eccentric man of the stage whose range of theatrical talents was as broad as his list of credits.

He had parts in classic comedies like Fawlty Towers and a stage version Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but also arty films like Derek Jarman's The Tempest (1979) and Brian Gibson's Breaking Glass (1980). He appeared on stage in Shakespeare and Dickens.

But he was best known for his involvement in experimental drama, both within a troupe and as a solo performer, leading him to be dubbed the 'King of Improv'.

He worked with the likes of Lindsay Anderson and Chris Langham in writing, directing and starring in several avant-garde productions and also founded his own touring theatre company in the 1970s, launching careers for the likes of Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy.

He also made television programmes on science, particularly paranormal phenomena, and wrote several treatises on topics as diverse as comedy, violin music and nudism.

Kenneth Victor Campbell was born on 10 December, 1941, in Ilford in Essex. He attended RADA and then joined the Colchester Rep where he was understudy to Warren Mitchell. He began writing his own plays and also had a spell as a director at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

In the early 1970s he was inspired by seeing the American Living Theatre to found his own improvisational theatre group which he dubbed the Ken Campbell Roadshow. The roadshow toured pubs across the country and performed surreal and bawdy comic routines.

Career highlights include the 1976 stage adaptation of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Co-written by and co-starring Mr Campbell and Chris Langham, the eight-and-a-half hour sci-fi epic opened in Liverpool and then transferred to the Royal National Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames.

For most of the '80s he performed one-man shows that blended science lectures with stand-up routines and surreal performance. In 1987 he auditioned to become the seventh Doctor Who but his interpretation was "too dark" for the producers, so Mr Campbell's former cohort Sylvester McCoy got the role.

Later in his career he split his time between appearing in West End productions and prime time television (he had parts in shows like Lovejoy, Judge John Deed and The Bill) and peculiar projects like translating Macbeth into the native tongue of Vanuatu, a small island nation in the south Pacific.

Mr Campbell was formerly married to one-time Bond girl Prunella Gee and they had one daughter. He died unexpectedly at the age of 66, just a few days after finishing an improvised stage show at the Edinburgh Festival.