An audio recording (held by the British Library), in which Sher’s Richard wooingly confronts the grieving, widowed Lady Anne beside the hearse of Henry VI, registers an exhilarating switch between plaintive earnestness and chillingly enjoyable calculation: “Didst thou not kill this king?” Penny Downie’s Anne asks. “I grant thee,” he breezily replies, and the audience is stunned into laughter.

Any actor of stature will commit themselves body and soul to a principal role, but with Sher you always felt that he had revolved over every detail like few others, never content with half-measures. That meant that though he wasn’t a household TV name, in the way, say, McKellen became, he would draw people in, brought glamour to the occasion.

For me, his Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, a curling, seething force of jealousy and erratic, splenetic madness, remains one of the RSC’s finest. He applied a mesmeric athleticism and sinister bluff affability to his Iago in Othello (2004), cementing his reputation for evoking envious, fragile, driven psyches.

As he got older, the physical tenacity weakened but the gain was palpable vulnerability – witness his Prospero, part of a South African production of the play that served as a kind of reckoning with Apartheid-era guilt. For months during the lockdown and after, the poster of the RSC play he was appearing in when Covid hit – Kunene and the King, which brought him back to South Africa and face to face with his old acting pal John Kani – stayed outside the Ambassador’s theatre, Sher smiling down like some sun-god. Though the poster finally vanished, there’s no question his name and example will blaze on.