The British actor Bob Peck shot to television stardom in 1986 in the acclaimed BBC drama serial, Edge of Darkness. His performance as the dour Yorkshire policemanRonaldCraven,inexorablydrawnbyhis daughter’s sudden and violent death into a passionate quest for the truth behind a series of incidents in a nuclear processing facility, won him Best Actor Awards from the Broadcasting Press Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television, as well as establishing an image of brooding diffidence that was to set the seal on a number of subsequent roles. His aquiline, yet disconcertingly ordinary, countenance was to become familiar to television audiences even if his name did not always spring to mind. Following the success of Edge of Darkness, and particularly toward the end of his life, Peck was much in demand for voice-overs and documentaries, to which his distinctive bass tones lent a potent mixture of assurance and mystery, as well as an association with the integrity of purpose that characterized his performance as Craven. Success in Edge of Darkness also brought him film roles, notably in the British productions The Kitchen Toto and On the Black Hill in 1987, then, most famously, as the doomed game warden Muldoon in Jurassic Park (1993).

Peck received no formal training as an actor but studied art and design at Leeds College of Art, where, in an amateur dramatic company, he was spotted by the writer-director Alan Ayckbourn, who recruited Peck to his new theater company in Scarborough. After stints in the West End and regional repertory, Peck joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he stayed for nine years, playing a wide range of parts in classical and contemporary work. One of his final appearances for the company was in the double role of John Browdie and Sir Mulberry Hawke in the epic dramatization of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, subsequently televised on Channel 4 in 1982. Along with Anthony Sher, Bernard Hill, and Richard Griffiths, Peck was one of a number of established stage actors in the early 1980s to be brought into television for roles in major new drama serials by BBC producer Michael Wearing.

Peck’s performance in Edge of Darkness embodied the paradox that is at the heart of the drama. Just as the labyrinthine plot remorselessly exposed the apocalyptic vision behind a veneer of English restraint, so Craven was depicted as a detached loner, whose mundane ordinariness hid long-repressed emotions and whose enigmatic composure exploded into bursts of grief, passion, and—in the closing moments—primal anguish. In this sense, Peck’s was also a performance that, like other work of this period (such as Hill’s Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff), brought to the surface the expressionistic subcurrents of a new wave of British television drama realism. Peck was cast as Craven partly because an unknown actor was wanted for the role and because it was written for a Yorkshireman, yet there are mystic and mythic elements in the quest conducted by this seemingly ordinary character that ultimately assume epic proportions. The plot called for long sequences of physical activity and energy, but Peck’s real achievement was a granite-like impassivity that just managed to hold back the pain and possible madness behind the character’s stoic endurance. This tension was cleverly offset by the puckish outlandishness of Joe Don Baker’s performance as the CIA agent Jedburgh.

The figure of Craven was partly reprised in the serial Natural Lies (BBC, 1992), where Peck played an advertising executive, Andrew Fell, accidentally stumbling across a conspiracy to cover up a BSE-like scare in the British food industry. In Centrepoint (Channel 4, 1992), another dystopian drama, Peck played Armstrong, a surveillance expert, this time with far-right security connections. In a serialization of Catherine Cookson’s The Black Velvet Gown (Tyne Tees, 1991), Peck brought his brooding presence to the role of the reclusive former teacher Percival Miller. He also played a real-life police officer in the drama-documentary Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990); a member of the Securitate state police in a semifictional account of the Romanian revolution, Shoot the Revolution (1990); and the role of the detective sergeant in the psychological crime thriller The Scold’s Bridle (1998).

Peck’s range, however, was wider than the image of the tormented hard man might suggest. Perhaps his most highly acclaimed performance after Edge of Darkness was as the mild-mannered, accident-prone academic James Westgate, who falls victim to his childhood sweetheart’s psychopathic desires, in Simon Gray’s Prix Italia–winning television play After Pilkington (BBC, 1987). Like many actors of his generation, Peck also was able to bring his stage experience to bear on a variety of classical roles, from Gradgrind in the BBC serialization of Hard Times (1994) and Shylock in a Channel 4 production of The Merchant of Venice (1996) to Nicias in The War That Never Ends (BBC, 1991)—a drama-documentary account of the Peloponnesian Wars written by former Royal Shakespeare Company director John Barton—and Dante in Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips’s A TV Dante: The Inferno Cantos I-VIII (Channel 4, 1989).

In the stage play In Lambeth, transposed to television in 1993, Peck played the role of Thomas Paine in an imaginary encounter with the poet William Blake, and, in the same year, he renewed his relationship with the work of Edward Bond in Bond’s play for the Crime and Punishment season, Tuesday (1993). “It’s nice to be able to sympathize with what you’re having to say,” Peck remarked when playing Paine. Much of his later voice-over work, from ecological series to documentaries on Britain’s clandestine support for Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War or the sugar trade in the Dominican Republic, reflected that quiet social commitment. Peck’s last work for television was in two British/Russian animated programs, as the voice of Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales and Joseph of Arimathea in The Miracle Worker.