Television audiences knew actor Roger Rees as the hilariously condescending Robin Colcord on “Cheers,” the glib British ambassador Lord John Marbury on “The West Wing” and numerous other characters in a four-decade small-screen career.

But the Welsh-born Rees’ first love was the theater, and he had the title role in the epic 8½-hour stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” that was a landmark hit in London and on Broadway in the early 1980s.

Though the production, which won him a Tony, featured nearly 40 actors, it had little in the way of traditional scenery. Through movement and simple props, the players created structures and even coaches in Dickens’ London.

“Suddenly, people realized there is nothing more exciting to the imaginative spirit of human beings than live theater,” Rees said in a 1986 Miami Herald interview. “Tiny actions can achieve epic proportions.”