John Sessions, actor and comedian, dies aged 67

The actor and comedian John Sessions has died at the age of 67, his agent has confirmed.

Sessions, who was best known for his appearances on TV panel-shows such as Whose Line is it Anyway?, passed away from a heart attack on Monday.

In a statement issued at midday on Tuesday, his agent Alex Irwin said that Sessions had “died at his home in South London from a heart condition”.

His friend and collaborator Ronni Ancona paid tribute to him, telling The Telegraph that he was “that rare commodity, a towering intellect who was able to translate his vast intelligence into highly accessible unadulterated comedy”.

His improvisatory performances, she said, were “like watching a high wire act without a net – the equivalent of chomping into a dangerous Japanese fish”.

Sessions was born in Ayrshire in 1953, and studied alongside Kenneth Branagh at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in the late 1970s.

He rose to prominence at the end of the 1980s through his televised one-man comedy shows, which took objects and stories volunteered by the public and spun from them improvisational routines.

In the 1990s, he became a familiar presence on British TV. He appeared in the cult surreal comedy Stella Street, and was a frequent panellist on QI and Have I Got News for You.

He also appeared in a number of films, and specialised in Shakespeare adaptations, most notably Branagh’s Henry V (1989), as the comic Irish officer Macmorris, and Michael Radford’s 2004 Merchant of Venice, as Salerio, friend to Jeremy Irons’s Antonio.

Sessions was openly gay, having been outed in 1994 by the Evening Standard while appearing in My Night with Reg, a comedy about gay life in London, at the Royal Court Theatre.

Unusually in the comedy world, he also expressed conservative views, becoming a frequent critic of the BBC, its management and its move to new headquarters in Salford.

In recent years, he also expressed his opposition to Scottish independence, and was vocally opposed to the European Union, telling The Independent in 2013 that he was “so bored with people going, ‘Ukip are a bunch of racists.’

“They're nothing of the kind. Nigel Farage talks more sense than the rest of the politicians put together.”