LOS ANGELES - British actor Peter Dennis, whose one-man show of readings from A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" books took him from the Hollywood Bowl to Westminster Palace in London, has died. He was 75.

Dennis died of cancer at his Los Angeles home on April 18, his wife, Diane, told the Los Angeles Times.

He performed his show - titled "Bother!" after a term often used by a troubled and confused Pooh - for decades in more than 100 venues in Europe and the United States.

The show stemmed from an impromptu reading Dennis gave at Cambridge University in 1976 to mark Pooh's 50th birthday, where he was shocked to find a packed house.

When he first performed the show in the U.S. at a small theater in West Hollywood in 1986 the Times called it "charming and whimsically absurd," and said Dennis "uncannily" evoked characters like Piglet, Pooh and Eeyore.

Dennis was born Oct. 25, 1933 in Dorking, England. He did not turn to acting until he was nearly 30, and did not discover "Winnie-the-Pooh" until he was 36, when a girlfriend took him to a London exhibition of Ernest H. Shepard's Milne illustrations.

Dennis moved to the Los Angeles area in 1991 and had small parts in movies like "Shrek" and "Sideways" and TV shows like the recent final episode of "ER."

In 1999, National Public Radio's "NPR Playhouse" ran a 13-week series of Dennis' readings from "Winnie-the-Pooh" and other Milne writings.

Dennis, like his fellow Englishman Milne, insisted the books were not solely, or even primarily, for kids.