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Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard’s screen career was only one part of a life spent moving between writing, directing and performance. Born Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard in Middelburg, South Africa, on 11 June 1932, he became best known as a playwright whose work confronted the realities of apartheid while remaining closely attentive to individual lives. That combination of political urgency and human-scale drama shaped Fugard’s acting. In 1961, he appeared with Zakes Mokae as the brothers Morris and Zachariah in the Johannesburg premiere of The Blood Knot, which Fugard also wrote. He returned as Morris for the BBC’s 1967 television version. His theatre work was collaborative from an early stage: he formed the Serpent Players in the 1960s and developed plays with performers including John Kani and Winston Ntshona. Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island emerged from that workshop process. Fugard brought the same direct, unadorned quality to film. He played Boesman opposite Yvonne Bryceland in Ross Devenish’s 1973 adaptation of Boesman and Lena. Away from adaptations of his own writing, he appeared as General Smuts in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi and as Doctor Sundesval in Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields. These were supporting parts, but they placed his restrained acting presence inside two large historical dramas. He also worked behind the camera. In 1992, Fugard made his film directing debut by co-directing The Road to Mecca with Peter Goldsmid, adapting one of his most acclaimed plays. The wider reach of his writing extended further through Gavin Hood’s film of Fugard’s novel Tsotsi, which won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. Fugard continued acting on stage alongside his writing and directing, including playing two roles in Valley Song and returning to performance in The Shadow of a Hummingbird. Across those different forms, he remained a writer-performer for whom acting was not separate from the work on the page, but another way of testing it in front of an audience.