Paul Scofield, the English actor who died on Wednesday at 86, was among the outstanding performers of his generation, and was particularly noted for his interpretations of the great Shakespearean roles. Scofield’s acting always sent a charge across the footlights. It was he who disrupted the mellifluous proprieties of the postwar British stage by introducing an aura of unpredictable wildness and danger. In partnership with directors such as Peter Brook, he redefined the characters, including Hamlet and King Lear, who lie at the heart of English drama.

Though not as widely recognized, Scofield seldom lost his identity in a role in the manner of, for example, Peter Sellers or Alec Guinness; somehow he always remained immutably himself. Scofield will probably be best remembered for his performance as Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons” (1966), both in the theater and in the cinema. The play had been a sensation on Broadway in 1961, and his performances in both play and film exemplified his gift for seeming equally sincere in either medium.

Scofield gave other memorable stage performances, as the whisky priest in a dramatization of Graham Greene’s novel “The Power and the Glory” (for which, in 1956, Scofield won the Evening Standard’s drama award) and as Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.”

A private man who never courted celebrity, when awarded the Academy Award for Best Actor for “A Man for All Seasons,” Scofield did not attend the ceremony and had the statuette mailed to him. Neither did he spread his talent widely: Many of his admirers regretted that, particularly in later life, he acted less often than they would have liked and less often than his gifts deserved.

Scofield once observed of his craft: “In a sense, you make music. You use the notes of a writer as a musician does, but the actor is, in effect, his own instrument. Whereas two violinists will always make the same tune from a row of notes, two actors will make different tunes from the same piece of text. This is not something you can learn in classes. It’s actually doing it.”

Sir Peter Hall, who directed Scofield at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, remembered: “He came as a real shock — you could suddenly feel this sulphurous passion. It was an entirely new note.”

Though Scofield’s bell-like clarity of speech compelled attention as instantly as John Gielgud’s, Alec Guinness’s, or Laurence Olivier’s, his stagecraft was quite different from that of his eminent colleagues.

But his presence — the strongly carved head, with its high temples and wide eyes that gave him the look of an Elizabethan miniature — always loomed. For one thing, he used all of his 6-foot-1-inch frame and stalked the stage with an ominous lope. “There was this sense of a tremendous volcano waiting to erupt,” Sir Peter said, “that had the audience gripped. And, of course, he spoke the verse perfectly. In fact, he’s as close to a genius as anyone I’ve ever worked with in the theater.”

Scofield was in London’s West End as a leading man for 15 years. In particular, his interpretations of Hamlet and Lear set the bar for performers from Moscow to New York, and he ran through most of the Shakespearean roster alongside Gielgud. But he always nursed a longing to play farce, which is what may have lured him into the musical “Expresso Bongo” in 1958.

In an age as celebrity-obsessed as our own, he was an anomaly. He graced no talk shows, authored no memoirs, and avoided interviews. Unlike all the other postwar stars of the British stage, he remained resolutely the one without a “handle.”

“Those sort of honors don’t really mean very much,” he said a few years ago. “Of course, the argument for accepting something like a knighthood is that it’s ‘for the profession’ — but who’s fooling themselves? It’s important to keep a certain distance, and not to lose altogether the gypsy feeling that acting had in the past. Too much respectability can take the edge away.”

David Paul Scofield was born on January 21, 1922, in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, one of three children of a village school headmaster. He was educated at Varndean School for Boys, Brighton, before going on to the London Mask Theatre School. His first professional appearance was in “Desire Under the Elms” at the Westminster Theatre in 1940.

Although Scofield sought to serve in the Army during World War II, he was turned down on medical grounds and instead spent the war years learning his craft with various repertory companies. He eventually joined what was then known as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon, playing a number of leading and prominent roles. Two of these took him to London, where his Mercutio in Peter Brook’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” drew critical attention. Then it was back to Stratford to consolidate his reputation as the most promising of young British actors with a production of “Hamlet” that perfectly expressed Scofield’s gifts for pensive melancholy and tentative sensibility.