on the Orient Express and Bateson in The Black Windmill (both 1974). He appeared on television in a wide range of roles, from Commander Traynor in a children's science fiction series, Timeslip (1971), to Charles II in A Bill of Mortality (1975), George Cannon in a serialisation of the Clayhanger novels (1976), and the title role in Frederic Raphael's version of Aeschylus's Agamemnon (1979). In 1977, the Royal Shakespeare Company offered Quilley the role of Captain Terri Dennis in Peter Nichols's Privates On Parade. It was a singing role, but far removed from the romantic leads he had sung before. The character is a camp performer and director in a 1940s army song-and-dance troupe in Malaya. At first he declined the role, but reconsidered, reckoning the captain to be the most human character in the piece; he played him, as The Guardian reported, "as a vulnerable human being rather than a buffoon". For his performance Quilley won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He reprised the role in a film version made in 1982. Also in 1977, on the West End, Quilley played James opposite Deborah Kerr in George Bernard Shaw's Candida. His last stage part of the decade was Sidney in Ira Levin's thriller, Deathtrap, which had a short run at the Garrick Theatre. 1980s and later Quilley returned to musicals in 1980, playing the title role in the first London production of Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. He won his second SWET award for the performance. He continued to divide his time between the musical and non-musical theatre. In 1983 he played Jupiter/Napoleon III in the BBC television production of Orpheus in the Underworld. In 1984 Quilley appeared on the original concept album for the musical Chess as Molokov. In 1985 at the Chichester Festival he co-starred with Diana Rigg in Antony and Cleopatra. Later that year he was in a BBC Mini-series Murder of a Moderate Man and a West End thriller, Fatal Attraction, before returning to musical theatre, in La Cage aux Folles in 1986. He played Georges, the partner of the flamboyant Albin (George Hearn). In The Guardian Michael Billington wrote that Quilley made his character "dapper, ebullient and tender: he persuades you he might have both sired a son and loved a man." In 1989 he played Francisco Pizarro in a national tour of The Royal Hunt of