Antony Sher, actor and writer, 1949-2021

Sir Antony Sher was one of the leading actors of his generation. A brilliant interpreter of Shakespeare, he was an honorary associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he gave many of his finest performances.

His death, at the age of 72, has left the company and the theatre world without one of its greatest and most versatile artists. When his terminal illness was announced in September, his husband Gregory Doran, artistic director of the RSC, took compassionate leave to care for him.

Sher’s Shakespearean career extended over four decades. After early work at Liverpool Everyman and with Gay Sweatshop, in 1982 he joined the RSC. In 1984, he gave a sensational, glitteringly nasty performance as Richard III, scuttling around the stage on crutches as the “bottled spider” of Shakespeare’s text. It was a career-defining role, seized from the many greats who had played it before and foreshadowing the astute physicality and boldness Sher would bring to his acting.

He won the Olivier Award in 1985 for both this performance and his role in the West End as a New York drag queen in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, saying in his acceptance speech: “I’m very happy to be the first actor to win an award for playing both a king and a queen.” 

He went on to play many of the Bard’s greatest characters, often for the RSC: Macbeth, Prospero, Lear, Shylock, Iago and, in 2014, Falstaff in Henry IV. As this much-loved rogue, Sher delivered a masterpiece of venal, duplicitous charm: twinkly, mischievous but suddenly revealing a streak of cold ruthlessness. He wrote an illuminating book about the experience, Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries.

Sher was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1949 to a Lithuanian-Jewish family. He moved to the UK in 1968 where he studied drama at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He would return to his South African roots with one of his final performances. In John Kani’s Kunene and the King (2019), he played an ageing, cantankerous South African actor preparing for the role of King Lear.

It was an immensely moving performance, characteristically subtle and precise, with Sher finding the deep wells of fear beneath all the bluster in the elderly character. But it also drew together memories of his childhood in apartheid South Africa and his abiding relationship with Shakespeare: Sher himself had given a stunning performance as Lear just a few years earlier.

He excelled at delivering such rich, multi-layered performances and in finding the underlying fear, guilt or panic driving a character. One of his most recent appearances was as a silky, chilling inquisitor in Harold Pinter’s study of persecution, One for the Road. Two decades earlier he was a disturbing lead in Brecht’s Arturo Ui at the National Theatre.

He gave a masterful performance as Willy Loman in Doran’s production of Death of A Salesman in 2015, and a riveting one as Sigmund Freud in Terry Johnson’s Hysteria. As Phillip Gellburg, the tormented Jewish protagonist in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass, he crafted a precision-tooled portrait of emotional restraint gnawed from within by pain and self-loathing.

Sher had an affinity with outsiders and with those ill at ease with themselves. “I was never built to play the hero,” he told the Financial Times in 2012. “And they’re not as rewarding to play . . . I like a bit of disturbance to get stuck into.”

He brought to those roles his personal experience as a white, gay, Jewish South African. He felt ashamed that his family, having fled persecution themselves, did not question the apartheid system. When first in England, he tried to distance himself from his nationality and to conceal his sexuality. But gradually he learnt to embrace his identity and to draw on his insecurities.

“I spent a lot of time trying to deny the three things I was,” he told the FT, “Jewish, gay and South African — all of them held shame for me. And I tried not to be those three things, which is absurd. How can you not be who you are? Especially as an actor, because you can’t start becoming other people until you know who you are.”

In person he was warm, courteous, very funny and quizzically intelligent. A highly accomplished writer and artist, as well as an actor, he wrote a number of plays — including ID and Primo (adapted from Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz) and The Giant (about the relationship between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci). He also wrote several memoirs, an autobiography and four novels. Middlepost, his first novel, traced the journey his family had made from eastern Europe to South Africa.

He regarded his acting and painting as complementary — both different forms of portraiture (in 2009 he completed “The Audience”, an enormous, autobiographical painting of dozens of people significant to him). In 2000, he was knighted for his services to theatre.

Sher and Doran married in 2015, a decade after their civil partnership, and the two frequently worked together. But Sher revealed that at home their favourite pastime was to watch wildlife programmes. “It’s good for actors to confront those things we have to act,” he said wryly. “Panic, pain and death.”