#David warner actor eyes tv#

Warner also starred in Hall's 1968 film of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' opposite Helen Mirren and Diana Rigg.ĭespite his acclaim as as a stage actor, chronic stage fright led Warner to prefer film and TV work for many years. Gregor Doran, the RSC's artistic director emeritus, said Warner's Hamlet, played as a tortured student, 'seemed the epitome of 1960's youth, and caught the radical spirit of a turbulent age.' His 1965 performance in the title role of 'Hamlet' for the company, directed by Peter Hall, was considered one of the finest of his generation. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Warner became a young star of the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing roles including King Henry VI and King Richard II. Often cast as a villain, Warner had roles in the 1971 psychological thriller 'Straw Dogs,' the 1976 horror classic 'The Omen,' the 1979 time-travel adventure 'Time After Time' - he was Jack the Ripper - and the 1997 blockbuster 'Titanic,' where he played the malicious valet Spicer Lovejoy. Warner's family said he died from a cancer-related illness on Sunday at Denville Hall, a retirement home for entertainers in London. I leave others to judge Warner’s film work but in the theatre he embodied a spirituality, natural grace and an exquisite sadness that will be much missed.David Warner, a versatile British actor whose roles ranged from Shakespearean tragedies to sci-fi cult classics, has died. Having made his name with the RSC in The Wars of the Roses, it seemed fitting that his last notable stage performance should be as Falstaff in Michael Boyd’s 2007 History cycle: he was especially brilliant in Henry IV, Part Two where he gave us a Falstaff aware of life’s lengthening shadows and approaching his inevitable end with all the dignity he could muster. In 2005 he was at Chichester playing King Lear in a Steven Pimlott production and, although I complained that he lacked Lear’s intemperate fury, few actors have been better in the final scenes: when Cordelia, in captivity, asked him if they would see her victorious sisters, Warner replied “No, no, no, no” with unforgettable determination.

He returned in 2001 to play Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara in New York and, instead of the usual bombastic tycoon, offered an unexpectedly moving portrayal of a man driven by profound love for his daughter. Ultimately, however, the movies claimed him and for three decades Warner was one of the finest actors not on the English stage. But, although film companies quickly came calling, leading to an astonishing performance as the mooncalf-hero of Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment, Warner continued to work in theatre: he was a reclusive Labour MP who spends his days growing pot in David Hare’s The Great Exhibition and the stammering Roman emperor in John Mortimer’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. He was one of them and they felt he was a hero speaking to them.”ĭriving past the site of Avoncliffe, where Hall lived at the time, Warner once told me that he took up residence in the Hall household during rehearsals to saturate himself in the part. As Tony Church, who played Polonius, remarked, “They recognised themselves in David. With his angular presence, his ruffled hair and a rust-red muffler about his neck, he seemed to embody the alienation and anti-establishment rebelliousness of 1960s youth who flocked to his performance. Almost inevitably the next year he was Hamlet in a Hall production.

In a complete Shakespeare history cycle in 1964, he went on to play Richard II and Mouldy in Henry IV Part Two as well as repeating his Henry VI. It was a performance that made Warner an integral part of the RSC in its formative years. Unforgettable determination … Kay Curram as Cordelia with David Warner as King Lear in 2005. Drawn together in later years by our shared Midlands background, I discovered that the qualities that informed his acting were also an essential part of his character.

Yet in both youth and age he showed similar gifts: an innate gentleness of spirit, a sense of latent melancholy, an inquisitive intellect. Warner’s stage career falls into two distinct halves: a youthful decade of riotous acclaim and a late-life flowering separated by a period from 1972 to 2001 when he forsook the stage to carve out a career in cinema. The eccentric-looking bookseller was, I suddenly realised, a potentially great actor. I had no idea who he was, until, in 1963, I saw him on the Stratford stage playing Trinculo, Cinna the Poet and, eventually, Henry VI. As a teenager in Leamington Spa in the late 1950s, I used to haunt the bookshop in a local department store, Burgis and Colbourne, where serving behind the counter was a lanky, straw-haired guy in an ill-fitting Dickensian suit. I have never forgotten my first sighting of David Warner, who has died aged 80.

David warner actor eyes