Antony Sher

Sir Antony Sher was a South African-born British actor, writer and painter whose work at the Royal Shakespeare Company across four decades made him one of the most respected classical performers of his generation. Possessed of a protean physicality, a ferocious intelligence and a restless creative appetite that spilled from the stage into memoir, fiction and fine art, he combined the emotional volatility of a great character actor with the meticulous research habits of a scholar. His career encompassed some of the most discussed Shakespearean performances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a body of acclaimed screen work and a parallel life as a chronicler of his own profession.

He was born Antony Sher on 14 June 1949 in Sea Point, a suburb of Cape Town, into a middle-class Jewish family whose Lithuanian ancestors had emigrated to South Africa a generation earlier. Growing up under apartheid left a lasting impression on him, and the experience of being both an outsider by sexuality and a member of a privileged white minority fed directly into the political and moral concerns of his later work. After completing compulsory military service, he left South Africa in 1968 and settled in Britain, initially hoping to study painting before auditioning successfully for the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He trained there from 1969 to 1971 and took British citizenship in 1979, eventually describing himself as a Londoner with a South African accent permanently buried somewhere beneath the surface.

His early years in the profession were spent in repertory and in the politically charged fringe theatre of the 1970s. He worked at the Liverpool Everyman alongside a generation that included Bill Nighy, Julie Walters and Jonathan Pryce, and then with the Joint Stock Company and at the Royal Court, where his performance as the Fool to Michael Gambon's Lear in 1982 signalled his arrival as a major classical actor. It was his first full season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984, however, that turned him into a star. His Richard III for director Bill Alexander, played on crutches as a scuttling, spider-like predator in black leather, became one of the defining Shakespearean performances of the decade and won him an Olivier Award. He chronicled the preparation and rehearsal of the role in the diary Year of the King, published in 1985, which remains a standard text on actor-training shelves for its candid account of research, self-doubt and the painter's sketchbooks that accompanied the process.

Over the following decades his RSC roles formed an extraordinary through-line of the Shakespearean canon. He played Shylock opposite Bill Alexander's direction in 1987, Tamburlaine in Terry Hands's 1992 revival of Marlowe, Leontes in The Winter's Tale, Macbeth opposite Harriet Walter in Gregory Doran's 1999 production, Iago, Prospero, Falstaff across both parts of Henry IV, and a celebrated King Lear in 2016. His Macbeth, restaged at the Young Vic and filmed for television, was noted for its hallucinatory modern-dress intensity, while his 2014 Falstaff was praised for finding melancholy and genuine tenderness beneath the comic bluster. Away from Shakespeare he excelled in new writing and in the great continental roles, winning a second Olivier in 1997 for Stanley Spencer in Pam Gems's Stanley at the National Theatre, and earning a Tony nomination when the production transferred to Broadway. He was a memorable Arturo Ui in Brecht's satire, Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Disraeli in Gems's Kean, Freud in Terry Johnson's Hysteria and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman opposite Harriet Walter.

Television and film work, though secondary to his stage career, included significant performances. He played the concentration-camp survivor Primo Levi in Primo, his own adaptation of Levi's If This Is a Man, which he performed at the National Theatre in 2004 and then filmed for the BBC and HBO in 2005, earning widespread admiration for the stillness and precision of the solo piece. Earlier he had appeared as Disraeli in the BBC's Mrs Brown, as Howard Katz in Patrick Marber's screen work, and in films including Shakespeare in Love, Mrs Brown, The Wolfman and The Moonstone. He also narrated documentaries, recorded extensively for BBC Radio and voiced a number of audiobooks, bringing the same forensic attention to the microphone that he brought to the stage.

Alongside acting he built a considerable second career as a writer. Year of the King was followed by Woza Shakespeare!, a joint diary written with Gregory Doran about their 1995 Titus Andronicus in post-apartheid Johannesburg, and by further theatre journals including Beside Myself, Primo Time and Year of the Fat Knight and Year of the Mad King, which tracked his preparation for Falstaff and Lear respectively. He published three novels, Middlepost, The Indoor Boy and Cheap Lives, as well as the play I.D. about the assassin of Hendrik Verwoerd. His paintings and drawings, many of them self-portraits in character, were exhibited regularly and collected by institutions including the National Portrait Gallery.

His private life was for a long time discreetly kept, and he came out publicly as gay in the 1980s at a point when few classical actors had done so. He met the director Gregory Doran in 1987; they entered a civil partnership in 2005, one of the first such ceremonies held in Britain, and converted it to marriage in 2015. Doran's long tenure as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company inevitably made them one of the most visible creative partnerships in British theatre, and they collaborated on many of Sher's greatest successes.

He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to acting, and held honorary degrees from the universities of Cape Town, Exeter, Liverpool and Warwick. He served as an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company and as a patron of numerous charities concerned with mental health, LGBT rights and refugee support, causes that connected back to his own early struggles with addiction and with belonging. Diagnosed with terminal cancer in the summer of 2021, he died at home in Stratford-upon-Avon on 2 December 2021, aged seventy-two. Tributes from Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and the wider theatre community described him as an actor of rare range and generosity, and his books and paintings ensured that the texture of his working life would remain unusually well documented for students of the craft.