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Antony Sher

Antony Sher was an actor whose screen career sat alongside an especially substantial life in the theatre. Born in Cape Town on 14 June 1949, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1968 and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art before completing a postgraduate course in Manchester. Work at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and with Gay Sweatshop followed, and he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. Sher’s major breakthrough came with the title role in the RSC’s 1984 production of Richard III, which earned him a Laurence Olivier Award. It began a remarkable run of classical and modern stage parts, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Macbeth, Shylock, Malvolio and Willy Loman. He won a second Olivier Award for playing painter Stanley Spencer in Stanley in 1997. His long association with Shakespeare also gave his career a satisfying symmetry: after playing the Fool in King Lear, he later took the title role from 2016 to 2018, becoming the only person to have played both parts at the RSC. On film, Sher could move comfortably between period drama, fantasy and comedy. His credits included Yanks, Superman II, Shadey and Erik the Viking. He played Chief Weasel in the 1996 adaptation of The Wind in the Willows and Benjamin Disraeli in Mrs Brown the following year. He was also cast as Thráin II in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, appearing in the film’s Extended Edition. Television offered similarly varied territory. Sher appeared in The History Man, Hornblower, The Jury and The Shadow Line, while Home placed him at the centre of an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space.” In God on Trial, he played Akiba. Acting was only one part of Sher’s work. He was also a novelist, playwright, memoirist, screenwriter and director. His books ranged from the Richard III memoir Year of the King to Year of the Fat Knight and Year of the Mad King, which won the 2019 Theatre Book Prize. Across those forms, he approached performance not just as a player, but as a writer and observer of the work itself.