The great project that Robert Bolt undertook with his little play might be called The Restoration - of values. That it should have been written just as the 1960s were dawning, and with them that decade's great challenge to all the old pieties, only adds to its continuing power and freshness. For there may be nothing so novel as the defense of old truths.

In a preface to the play that ought to be required reading in law schools, the playwright tried to explain to the modern reader why a man would go to his death rather than just "put his hand on an old black book and tell an ordinary lie." Robert Bolt did so through the written word, Paul Scofield through the spoken. The playwright provided the lines, but it took a great actor to give them a vivid power that seals their meaning in our minds.

Paul Scofield would win both a Tony and an Academy Award in the 1960s. Decades later, no one who had seen him in "A Man for All Seasons" was likely to forget its continuing relevance when the smoothest of American politicians and lawyers were explaining that, far from a high crime and misdemeanor, perjury was no great matter - at least not if committed by a political leader of sufficiently high rank like a president of the United States.

To those who knew the play, the question that captured a nation's flitting attention at the end of the 20th Century had been definitively answered long before - not just in Robert Bolt's plain words but in the rolling, deeply humane cadences of Paul Scofield's soft but far-carrying voice. The Sir and Saint Thomas that he gave the world remains unforgettable after all this time: by turns knowing and innocent, playful and sorrowful, and, perhaps most impressive of all, the most amiable and sociable of men.

Paul Scofield was a shy, private man off-stage. You wouldn't find him discussing his politics or performances on late-night talk shows. Once the curtain fell, he became one of the throng of unnoticeable commuters headed home after work to wife and family.

The actor respectfully declined the knighthood that was offered him in the 1960s, perhaps because he didn't want the attention, perhaps because becoming Sir Paul might have put a barrier between himself and his fellow actors. Like all the truly great, he realized he was but one of a whole cast. No matter. Actors know their trade, and always treated him as the knight he was anyway.