Oscar Winner Paul Scofield Dies At 86

[David Challinor]

Scofield would have played O'Brien in the filmed version of Orwell's 1984 instead of Richard Burton, but he broke his leg ....lucky for old Rich' then, to go out on a high shortly before his own death 23 years ago. I can hear his Welsh tones, amused at the irony, "Break a leg, luv"

[billy bentley]

Sad news indeed. Loved him IN "A Man For All Seasons," but have no memory of him in "The Train" (great Frankenheimer/Lancaster/Tournier/Wattiz) who did he play ?

[christoph404]

Brilliant actor, I guess his most celebraed film role is in "A Man For All Seasons" which was certainly a tour de force, I personally favoured his portrayal of the obsessed German officer in "The Train", also worth watching is the seldom seen "Scorpio" again with Burt Lancaster ,and Alain Delon.He had a fairly good innings I guess but indeed a sad loss.

[christoph404]

Originally Posted by billy bentley Sad news indeed. Loved him IN "A Man For All Seasons," but have no memory of him in "The Train" (great Frankenheimer/Lancaster/Tournier/Wattiz) who did he play ?

There were two main protagonists in "The Train", the Burt Lancaster character and the German officer who is determined to convey the valuable paintings via train into Germany at all costs, he is off course played by Scofield! , it was quite a memorable role and performance!

[David Brent]

For such a superb actor Paul Scofield's body of film and television work is surprisingly small. He seemed to prefer working on the stage.

He enhanced everything he played in. He had a tremendous presence about him.
A truly great actor. Another very sad loss.

Dave.

[julian_craster]

Scofield as Sir Thomas More in 'A Man for All Seasons', 1961


The Independent
Friday, 21 March 2008

"It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth", reflected Paul Scofield late in his career, adding "but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been".

Scofield happily accepted a CBE ("an honour with a hint of hard work about it"), but declined a knighthood. This was fundamental to one who shunned the flim-flam of fame – even when international stardom came his way with the film A Man f or All Seasons. He enjoyed a profoundly happy marriage to Joy Parker – they met as young actors – for more than six decades, and for most of his life remained in the Sussex village where he had been born.

Even a brief selection of the roles tackled by Scofield indicates a phenomenal range, unmatched by any other great actor of his era. In several of those parts – Hamlet and Lear (under Peter Brook, the director with whom he was most crucially associated), Timon and Borkman – Scofield was supreme. He excelled at riven men, or when playing two men simultaneously (the twins of Ring Round the Moon or, on television, both upright old Martin and malign Antony, the Chuzzlewitt brothers in Martin Chuzzlewitt). These "double" roles seemed to liberate Scofield to reach the highest planes of acting; especially dazzling was his Khlestakov, the shabby-genteel clerk spiralling into self-mythism in the mistaken identity of Gogol's The Government Inspector (Aldwych, 1966).

Discovering at an early age his love of acting – as a schoolboy Juliet he divined a turning-point in his life "because thenceforward there was nothing else I wanted to do" – he never deviated from the kind of actor he aimed to be:

I enjoy the loss of myself, of discovering a writer's human creation . . . Effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to make effects; I wanted . . . to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.

This was the deepest Scofield would go into analysis of the alchemy of his secret art, that sense of mystery which informed many of his "particular human beings" with their special nimbus.

Scofield's Sussex childhood was happy but somewhat bifurcated; his mother was a Catholic and his father's headmastership of Hurstpierpoint's Church school meant "some days we were little Protestants and on others devout little Catholics" – and his father was "sir" at school and "dad" at home.

Leaving school at 17 Scofield trained briefly at the Croydon Rep – crossed toes (later used to considerable effect for several distinctive stage walks) exempted him from call-up – and at the London Mask Centre, where Eileen Thorndike spotted his gift. She took him into her semi-professional company in Bideford, Devon, where he was soon being cast in leading parts.

During a period based mostly in Birmingham, Scofield worked for the Travelling Repertory Company under Basil C. Langton, a saturnine Canadian who cast Scofield as Horatio in Hamlet (Joy Parker played Ophelia), Sergius in Arms and the Man (Birmingham, 1942), and, in London, as a heroic young miner in John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down (Westminster, 1943).

Birmingham saw the earliest Scofield glory years when Sir Barry Jackson, one of the theatre's great talent-spotters, brought him into the company at the Birmingham Rep at the start of its revival as the country's leading regional house. The company's directors included the wunderkind Peter Brook, at 20 already displaying precociously dazzling invention.

Scofield played a much-praised Tanner in Man and Superman (Birmingham, 1945) for Brook, who worked with him on his demanding speeches, infusing them with the authentically Shavian bristling energy; the Scofield voice, dark velvet with an arresting rift and stamped by a ringing upper register, was already unmistakable.

When Jackson took over the Stratford Memorial Theatre he took Scofield and Brook with him. For Love's Labour's Lost (1946) Watteau was Brook's inspiration for a romantic landscape of stately parks; Don Armado was played by a Scofield, who gave an astonishingly mature tragi-comic portrayal of meditative detachment (he was compared with "a beautiful old borzoi").

For some, even more memorable than Armado, was the following season's Mephistopheles in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (1949); Scofield's quiet delivery of: "Why, Faustus, this is hell, nor are we out of it" breathed the torments of eternity, freezing the blood. Back with Brook he tackled Mercutio in a controversial Romeo and Juliet (1947) – the director threw out most of the scenery during a dress-rehearsal to create a sun-baked "empty space" – giving another revelatory portrayal. He delivered the "Queen Mab" speech lying on his back; it was described by Peter Ustinov as sounding "like an elusive nocturne from a man who didn't like to be referred to as a poet, talking in his sleep".

A third Stratford season gave him the chance to give his first Prince in Hamlet (1948). J. C. Trewin, most trustworthy of Hamlet-spotters (85 covered in his critical career), noted perceptively: "I have not met a performance less externalised, able to communicate suffering without emotional pitch and toss; he had that within which passeth show." This performance mined the pathos of Hamlet as spiritual fugitive.

The powerful commercial management H.M. Tennent under Hugh ("Binkie") Beaumont cast him in the leading role of Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan's Adventure Story (St James, 1949), but his big West End breakthrough came with his twin turn as faithless Hugo and modest Frederick in Fry's version of Jean Anouilh, Ring Round the Moon (Aldwych, 1949) with Brook directing in a Oliver Messel set, perfectly pitched for a particular public hungry for romantic escapism (it ran for two years).

An admirer of John Gielgud, Scofield jumped at the chance to play Don Pedro – wryly contemplative – in a remounting of Gielgud's famous production of Much Ado About Nothing (Phoenix, 1952) to Gielgud's Benedick, and was keen to rejoin Gielgud and Brook for a Lyric, Hammersmith season in 1952/3.

Inevitably perhaps, Scofield's King in Richard II (1952) directed by Gielgud, the outstanding Richard of his generation, was distinctly constrained; chillier, perhaps, than usually played, this Richard impressed most in the earlier episodes. Gielgud also directed him as a hilariously self-absorbed Witwood in The Way of the World (1953), but the glory of the season was Brook's chiaroscuro revival of Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1953) with Gielgud and Scofield thrillingly matched as the conspirators Jaffeir and Pierre.

Now a box-office star, in Wynyard Browne's A Question of Fact (Piccadilly, 1953), a slow-burn study of hereditary insanity, Scofield headed a remarkable cast including Gladys Cooper and Pamela Brown for a long run. He combined this with his first movie role, playing Philip II of Spain opposite an eye-patched Olivia de Havilland as the Princess of Eboli in That Lady (1954), a performance of careworn majesty, perfectly scaled for the camera's ruthless perception of thought. The rushes had 20th Century-Fox's Darryl Zanuck insist that Scofield's part be built up ("we can make him a real star").

A second Hamlet (1955), directed by Brook, was part of a 1955/6 Phoenix Theatre season and also visited Moscow. Again Scofield, with his usually unerring hot-line to the audience, pierced directly to the heart, perceptibly finding more irony in the role. Brook worried while Hamlet was playing during rehearsals for The Power and the Glory (1956), adapted from Graham Greene's novel, that his star might not be ready in time. Scofield remained unruffled, closed in Hamlet on a Saturday, had his hair cut ruthlessly en brosse on the Sunday and made Brook and the production team gasp when he stepped on to the stage at the Theatre Royal, Brighton for the Monday dress-rehearsal of the pre-London try-out.

Scofield simply had not been ready totally to inhabit the Priest until Elsinore was behind him; he seemed diminished physically in his rumpled suit and spectacles, ineffably touching as Greene's riven anti-hero.

A changing British theatre post-Look Back in Anger made life difficult for many actors, but Scofield's career was never knocked off course. He surprised many by taking on the musical Expresso Bongo (Saville, 1958), filling an unlovely barn of a theatre with his richly enjoyable Johnnie, in this larky lampoon of Denmark Street mores.

In 1960, A Man for All Seasons (Globe, 1960 and Anta, New York, 1961) made him an international star, particularly after the screen version (1966) on which the director Fred Zinnemann battled for him against the moguls' demand for Olivier. Ruled by a flinty integrity, Sir Thomas More found the perfect interpreter in Scofield, who won an Oscar for the role; others' performances have revealed the cracks in Robert Bolt's play while with Scofield at its heart, disavowing any scruple of plaster-saint sentimentality, the man's dilemma gripped and held throughout.

Rather than pursue Hollywood offers, he chose to prepare for the biggest challenge of his collaboration with Brook. Back at Stratford, now housing the Royal Shakespeare Company, King Lear (1962) was a summation of Brook's classical work and a distillation of Scofield's formidable Shakespearean experience. It was genuinely revelatory and Scofield's courageous performance justified Peter Hall's verdict:

To me he was the first post-war actor who grasped a very modern idea and stripped his character of their glamour and sentimentality; there was a lack of crowd-pleasing; he revealed the character, warts and all.

Brook's approach was Beckettian in its evocation of a merciless world – another virtually denuded stage, of crumbling blackened wood and corroded metal – to suggest "this great stage of fools". Like the rest of a wondrous cast, Scofield went happily along with Brook's refusal to make definite moral judgements on the characters; in this godless universe Lear's arrogance was signally not underplayed, but still the character's essential humanity, increasingly powerful in the empyrean of the Dover scenes, burnt through.

His Goneril, Irene Worth, marvelled at Scofield's mesmerising ability in Lear's scene in an imaginary pulpit to mint thought with the frantic speed of a whizzing mind – "thought in an electric blender" was her description.

Peter Hall wanted to keep Scofield with the RSC. For John Schlesinger he electrified in a notoriously difficult role as Timon of Athens (Stratford, 1966). By contrast he fused the house with his comic amperage in The Government Inspector (Aldwych, 1966), and as the more outrageous ("Gawd help us all and Oscar Wilde!") of two camp coiffeurs in Charles Dyer's Staircase (Aldwych, 1966). Hall's oddly ineffectual Macbeth (Stratford, 1967) was, however, a major disappointment, with Scofield and his Lady (Vivien Merchant) ill-matched.

At the Royal Court, Scofield lit up John Osborne's Hotel in Amsterdam (1968), playing a showbiz charmer and then returned to Sloane Square for a heart-stopping Vanya in Uncle Vanya (1970). This raised comparisons with Michael Redgrave's supreme Chichester performance in its electric alternation from pathos to comedy. He returned to the Court, drawn by Christopher Hampton's new play Savages (1973), to play West, a captured diplomat.

Most of Scofield's major later performances were for the National Theatre, beginning with a glorious bang in The Captain of Köpenick (1971). He was a Pirandello admirer but the National's The Rules of the Game (at the New, 1971) was a leaden production. Yet Scofield offered a mesmerising enigma as Leone, his face a mask-like tabula rasa as he plotted his amatory revenge, suggesting a furnace below the carapace of cool.

A buoyant Volpone (1979) was driven by Scofield in ebullient form as the voracious Venetian Fox. Then came his greatest South Bank popular success – his hooded-eyed Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1979), the unparalleled voice scoring cadenzas of cankered jealousy and anguish in his resentment of Mozart's success.

Conserving his energy for Othello (1980) rather than star on Broadway with Amadeus, the result was a major disappointment. Peter Hall's production was stately and dull with a miscast Michael Bryant as Iago; there were flashes of essential Scofield – he played the close with Desdemona unforgettably, freighted with fathomless sorrow – but after the promise of a superb previous radio production by John Tydeman with Nicol Williamson and Scofield both in exhilarating form, this was small beer.

Back in the commercial theatre his Nat in the Broadway success I'm Not Rappaport (Apollo, 1986) had such life-enhancing zest that it (almost) papered over the piece's slickness, although not even Scofield and two of his favourite actors (Alec McCowen and Eileen Atkins) could salvage Jeffrey Archer's Exclusive (Strand, 1989). A more fitting farewell to the West End came with his magisterial Shotover in Heartbreak House (Haymarket, 1992), when he mined Shaw's comedy with spring-heeled relish.

Back at the National, his valedictory stage appearance tackled another major peak – the self-exiled caged wolf at the centre of John Gabriel Borkman (1996), with Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Aitkins formidable, too, as warring wife and sister-in-law. He rose to magnificent heights, soaring high in the mighty final scene as Borkman surveys his dream-kingdom.

Scofield did not despise or patronise the screen although he distrusted the "celebrity" world around it (he made, in all, 16 movies). A Man for All Seasons remained his best film opportunity, but he gave other striking performances – the King of France in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1988), and a fittingly haunting Ghost in Franco Zefferelli's Hamlet (1990).

Unexpected choices included a delicately etched Orlik in the film of Bruce Chatwin's Utz (1991). Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) saw a consummate performance as Mark Van Doren, a Boston Brahmin academic whose son (Ralph Fiennes) cheats on a television show. In this study of the corruption of American values, Scofield's baffled, patrician grace made for a shining plus. Redford noticed that, despite missing home and family, on set Scofield had "a complete joy in acting".

Alongside countless radio performances – he loved the medium and recorded classics, poetry-readings, new plays and anthologies – Scofield enjoyed some diverse television work. He appeared in two of Noël Coward's last stage roles from Suite in Three Keys (1981), and also tackled some roles he had never played on stage including the Captain in Strindberg's Dance of Death (1965). He revealed himself, too, as an ideal Jamesian when playing the innocently hidebound Strether of The Ambassadors (1977).

But any survey of Scofield's quietly astonishing career must return to the stage. Without any false modesty he owned how much he genuinely enjoyed his work – for him the theatre's only big disadvantage was the necessity to work in cities – once saying:

A long time ago I realised I should have to choose between films and theatre – and the theatre has always come first. I'm not an actor because I feel the need to say "look at me – aren't I clever?" I don't have an inferiority complex I must disguise. I'm an actor because . . . oh, because I'm good at it. I can say honestly and, I hope, without self-satisfaction, that I'm happy with my lot.

That quiet certitude was the square-root of the equation which made up Scofield's theatrical mystery. It was also at the heart of the man, the world-famous star known locally in Sussex simply as "Mr Sco".

Alan Strachan

David Paul Scofield, actor: born Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex 21 January 1922; CBE 1956; married 1943 Joy Parker (one son, one daughter); died 19 March 2008.

-----------------------------------------

[julian_craster]

Obituary
Paul Scofield


The Oscar-winning star of A Man For All Seasons was one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time

Lyn Gardner
Thursday March 20, 2008
guardian.co.uk

On stage, the actor Paul Scofield, who has died aged 86, was braver than a lion. Off stage this genial man kept his private life quiet as a mouse. This might have made him a frustrating and disappointing subject for interviewers and biographers, but it ensured he was always celebrated for his talent never just as a celebrity. It is almost impossible to think of an actor for whom the term "luvvie" would be more inappropriate.

Article continues
As Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of the National Theatre, who tempted Scofield back to the theatre to play John Gabriel Borkman at the NT in 1996, observed: "It is hard not to be Pollyannaish about Paul because he is such a manifestly good man, so humane and decent, and curiously void of ego - all the pride he has is channelled through the thing he does brilliantly. He has a very powerful personality, but it is not there as a parallel idiosyncrasy."

He was born in Sussex to the wife of the headmaster of the Hurstpierpoint village school. He was 13 when he discovered acting at the Vardean school for boys in Brighton, where he was considered an academic no-hoper. He donned a blonde wig for his first role as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and his natural talent and easy manner on stage won him further starring roles, including Rosalind in As You Like It.

There was never any doubt that he was bound for a career in the theatre and in 1939, aged 17, he left school to begin his training at Croydon repertory theatre. The war intervened, but Scofield was declared unfit for service due to a toe defect that prevented him from wearing military boots. With the Croydon school closed, Scofield moved to the London mask theatre and when two of the teachers, Eileen Thorndike (sister of the famous actor Sybil) and Herbert Scott, decided to evacuate the school to Devon and run it as a repertory theatre, Scofield went with them.

Here he began his training in earnest playing a succession of roles many of which would not have come his way so early but for the war. Although not yet 20, his performances got him noticed. A local critic was impressed, declaring: "One would hesitate to put any limits to what this actor is going to be able to do as he grows older."

There were indeed no limits, except perhaps those he set on himself in the later part of his career, which meant that there were fewer stage appearances than one might have wished. In an interview Scofield himself once declared: "As an actor I don't admit to any limitations. In rehearsal one comes up against apparently insuperable barriers, but if one can imaginatively get past them, overreach one's natural reach, it is astonishing how elastic one can become. I've got to go not so far as I can, but as far as is needed. It's up to somebody else to say if I've made a fool of myself."

Scofield, more craggily noble in appearance than handsome, always looked more mature than he was (he once said that he had bags under his eyes by the age of 17) and even at this tender age his features had a timeless rather than matinee idol appearance that allowed him to play parts intended for actors much older.

But it was his voice that marked him out. It already had the sonority and "iron sweetness" that the film director Fred Zinnemann, who directed Scofield in his Oscar-winning performance as Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (1966), called "a Rolls Royce being started up." The critic JC Trewin once described Scofield's voice as "sunlight on a broken column".

This was not to say that a man who became one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time always found speaking verse easy. Later in life he was to admit that in his early career he had thought finding the sense of the verse was enough, and that it was only later he realised the crucial importance of rhythm.

Touring the country giving performances in munitions factories and other venues lead to him coming to rest briefly, in 1942, at Birmingham Rep, a theatre that was to play a major part in career. Here he was an exceptional Horatio in Hamlet and also met his future wife, the actor Joy Parker, who was cast as Ophelia. The two married in 1943, and it was his contentment with married and family life that soon followed that gave Scofield the grounding that ensured that he never became too full of himself or saw acting as too glamorous.

Acting, he once opined, was just "my job". It was through family, not career, that Scofield defined himself. Once when asked how he would like to be remembered, he replied: "If you have a family, that is to be remembered." After the war he returned to Birmingham Rep, one of the most vibrant theatres in the country under the guidance of the renowned Barry Jackson. Again, a huge number of roles followed quickly from Konstantin in The Seagull to a memorably bombastic Mr Toad in Toad of Toad Hall.

It was at Birmingham that Scofield also met a young 20-year-old director called Peter Brook. who was just starting out on his career. In subsequent years the two men were to be crucial to each other's futures and reputations. Brook was the first modern director and in Scofield, whose still presence on stage eschewed the flamboyance of an earlier generation, he found the first great modern actor.

As Peter Hall was to observe, Scofield's talent was "a sulphurous passion" and his acting offered the post-war British theatre "an entirely new note" that set him apart from the Oliviers, Gielguds and Richardsons who came before. Brook's Hamlet (1955), which became known as the Moscow Hamlet because of its run in the USSR where Scofield was the first English-speaking actor to play the role since 1917, was truly a Hamlet for a generation; although Scofield had already played the role to considerable acclaim in 1948 for director Michael Benthall at Stratford. Harold Hobson declared that he had "never seen a Hamlet more shot through with the pale agony of irresolution." (In 1990, Scofield came full circle and played the Ghost in Zefferelli's film of Hamlet, starring Mel Gibson in the title role.)

Scofield had been enticed to Stratford with Jackson and Brook in 1946 and began a long association with the RSC. It was around this time that he also began working in radio, a medium that he adored and which was the perfect vehicle for his beautiful voice. Even in later life when he deserted the theatre for long periods he continued to appear in BBC radio plays and do many readings, attracted by both the quality and the anonymity that the medium offered. It was where he did some of his very greatest work.

Film never had the same appeal for him. Hollywood frequently beckoned from as early as the late 1940s and Darryl Zanuck on seeing a Scofield screen test declared: "That actor! The best I've seen since John Barrymore." In the early years and with a young family, Scofield had no intention of decamping to Los Angeles and by the time he was an established star in the British theatre he had seen what Hollywood had done to some of his contemporaries including Richard Burton, a young actor with a classical talent that Scofield recognised when he admitted that he worried that "he'd get to King Lear before me".

In the end it was no contest. Scofield first tackled the role aged just 40 at Stratford in 1962 in a Peter Brook production described by Kenneth Tynan as "a mighty philosophical farce" enacted "in a world without gods, with no possibility of hopeful resolution." Of Scofield's Lear he declared: "You will never see such another." The production toured to ecstatic notices around the world, and a film version was made in 1969. Thirty-three years later Scofield returned to the role of Lear in a superb production for Radio Three.

In the end Scofield's entire work on film amounted to less than 20 roles, and although it was clearly not his natural milieu - he told his biographer Garry O'Connor that he disliked the intrusiveness of the camera - his best performances were magnificent. He deservedly won the Oscar for Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, a role in which he had already triumphed onstage. He didn't turn up to collect the Oscar and it was posted to him from Hollywood and got broken in transit which didn't worry the actor in the slightest.

Twenty years later he got another Oscar nomination for his role as the upstanding Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford's Quiz Show, a film that brought him to the attention of a younger generation who had never had the opportunity to see him on stage. Two years later he played Judge Danforth in Nicholas Hytner's screen version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible and was quite the best thing in it.

The stage, however, was his home for the 1950s to the 1970s, although as that decade progressed his appearances became more infrequent. His choices were always eclectic, ranging from the great classical roles to the musical Expresso Bongo (1958) and even a Jeffrey Archer play Exclusive in 1989.

Away from the classical repertoire his greatest successes were as the whiskey-soaked priest in a stage adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, a part that he had to dig hard inside himself to find, and which Laurence Olivier, never one to be generous to other actors and potential rivals, declared: "the best performance I can remember seeing."

Other notable roles were as Alan West in Christopher Hampton's Savages (1973) and as the envious Salieri, in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus directed by Peter Hall at the National Theatre in 1979. The latter was a triumph and Scofield could have gone with it to New York. Instead, he chose to stay at the National and play Othello, a role he had already made his own on radio in a 1972 production by John Tydeman who directed much of the actor's best radio work.

It was from around the time of Othello at the National that Scofield's stage appearances began to become more infrequent. Although some TV appearances, most particularly the title role in a serial adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit on BBC TV in 1994, brought him to wid er attention, his stage appearances were few and far between.

When he did appear on stage he dazzled even in old age. In 1992 he played Captain Shotover in Trevor Nunn's production of Heartbreak House in the West End, and he played John Gabriel Borkman, the dishonoured banker, in Ibsen's play at the National in 1996. It was, declared the Guardian's Michael Billington, "his finest performance since King Lear" adding that "Scofield's greatness lies in the way he reveals the private turmoil behind the posturing facade."

His final stage appearance was at the Almeida in 2001 when he read the love letters that Anton Chekhov wrote to the actor Olga Knipper, who later became his wife. It was full circle for Scofield who had met the then frail 86-year-old Knipper when he had played Hamlet in Moscow all those years previously.

It was theatre's loss that Scofield performed so infrequently on stage during the last 30 years of his life, but perhaps he would not have been such a great actor if he had had more of a need to perform. For many actors, it is a flaw in their characters or some damage to their personality that makes them actors in the first place. This was patently not the case with Scofield who did not take his acting home with him and clearly found as much contentment with his family and pottering in his Sussex garden in Balcombe as he did playing the great roles.

This did not demean either, but only added to the sense of an actor whose still quiet centre was not a posture, but the real thing. He was made a CBE in 1956, rejected a knighthood but accepted being made a Companion of Honour in 2001. His greatest honour, however, was in giving a great deal of pleasure to the theatre-going public.

His wife, a son and a daughter survive him.

Brian Baxter writes: With uncharacteristic prescience, Bafta crowned Paul Scofield as best newcomer for his screen debut in That Lady. It was 1955, Scofield was 33 and his role as the elderly King Philip II of Spain had been expanded at the instigation of producer Darryl F Zanuck.

Three years later came Carve Her Name With Pride, playing the colleague who loves Violette Szabo, in a clichéd but decent biopic of the second world war heroine. Despite a preference for theatre, he worked steadily on screen and, excepting Michael Winner's zoom-laden Scorpio (1973), showed a commitment beyond a desire to pay school fees.

Another war story initiated Scofield into the ways of big budget megalomania. He claimed that he was unsure what movie directors wanted of a classical actor, but John Frankenheimer, who had taken over The Train (1964) from Arthur Penn, saw him as the perfect foil to the athletic Burt Lancaster. Scofield played a fanatical German officer intent on stealing a train load of art treasures; Lancaster a French railway worker out to defeat the Nazi's plan. It was a logistically ambitious movie and a contrast to Scofield's next - most famous - film, in which he recreated his triumph as Sir Thomas More. In A Man For All Seasons (1966), his genius was in redefining More in a perfectly nuanced screen performance.

Resisting other offers, he played a cameo in Peter Brook's anti Vietnam-war movie Tell Me Lies (1968), then took the intriguing role of the thwarted employer in Bartleby (1971). An adaptation of a Herman Melville story about a clerk who proves obstinate and unyielding, it provided a memorable two-hander for Scofield and John McEnery.

For Brook, he reprised his Aldwych theatre success in King Lear (1969). But the movie, shot in Denmark, proved glum and misguidedly busy, redeemed only by Scofield. Scorpio followed it, when, playing a Russian agent, he was reunited with Lancaster. Also in 1973, he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, directed with theatrical reverence by Tony Richardson.

Scofield was off the screen for more than a decade - returning with Summer Lightning (1984). On television he enjoyed greater success, playing Karenin in a sturdy Anna Karenina and Otto Frank in The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988).

He was attracted to the ecological drama, When the Whales Came (1989), playing an elderly eccentric, then on familiar ground as the French king in Kenneth Branagh's rousing Henry V. He stayed with Shakespeare for Franco Zeffirelli's underrated Hamlet (1990), where Scofield's mannered and intriguing voice suited The Ghost to perfection.

That spirited work ushered in a busy period, including Utz, from Bruce Chatwin's novel and the prestige mini-series Martin Chuzzlewit. More interestingly he narrated the first of two docu-dramas by Patrick Keiller. In London (1994), he wryly commented on the state of the capital, as observed by a group exploring the city. Three years later Keiller made Robinson in Space, another jaundiced view of present-day Britain where Scofield's voice, memorably described as rusty, provided another tellingly oblique commentary.

In contrast, he returned to the mainstream in Robert Redford's factually based Quiz Show (1994), as the acerbic father to a fraudulent game-show contestant. It gained him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor. Scofield was memorably cast as Judge Danforth in Nicholas Hytner's treatment of The Crucible (1996), Arthur Miller's play about the 17th-century Salem trials. The actor's slightly imperious manner and timeless face suited period roles. Equally, his distinctive voice added lustre to the TV version of Animal Farm (1999), as Boxer.

· David Paul Scofield, actor, born January 21 1922; died March 19 2008

[julian_craster]

Paul Scofield

Daily Telegraph
21/03/2008


Paul Scofield, who died on Wednesday aged 86, was among the outstanding actors of his generation, and was particularly noted for his interpretations of the great Shakespearean roles.

Scofield's most obvious quality was his ability to bring a poised tension to everything that he did.

When he was the focus of attention, his voice, his movements, his facial expressions all combined to stir in the spectator an almost sub-conscious curiosity about what might happen next.

He would seldom lose his identity in a role in the manner of, for example, Peter Sellers or Alec Guinness; somehow he always remained immutably himself.

A private man who never courted celebrity, he rarely granted interviews or appeared on chat shows; when awarded an Oscar for best actor for A Man For All Seasons he did not attend the ceremony, and had the statuette mailed to him in England. Neither did he spread his talent widely: many of his admirers regretted that, particularly in later life, he acted less often than they would have liked and less often than his gifts deserved.

Scofield played some of the great Shakespearean roles with memorable power - his King Lear for Peter Brook was perhaps his most celebrated stage performance - but he also brought to modern roles a rare elegance and distinction. He was as fine as a fop in Restoration comedy, or as an effeminate hairdresser in Charles Dyer's Staircase, as he was playing the twin brothers in Anouilh's Ring Round The Moon or Konstantin in The Seagull.

What Scofield always exhibited in his acting was taste. He never appeared to be embarrassingly miscast, always seemed to have chosen and to have approached a role with care. And he was one of the few first-rate theatrical actors whose art on the screen did not seem exaggerated or so diminished as to lose its charm.

He will probably be best remembered for his performance as Thomas More in Robert Bolt's Man For All Seasons, both in the theatre and in the cinema - for his role in the film (1966) he won both an Oscar and a Bafta, while the play had been a sensation on Broadway in 1961. His performances in both play and film exemplified his gift for seeming equally sincere in either medium.

He gave other memorable stage performances as the whisky-priest in a dramatisation of Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory (for which, in 1956, he won the Evening Standard's drama award) and as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus.

Scofield could create sympathy without stooping to sentimentality; and, in particular, sympathy for intellectual figures. This was partly due to his naturally graceful manner and partly to an innate reserve. The suggestion was of a cautious intelligence, a reflective disposition, which, when applied to parts such as Harry in TS Eliot's Family Reunion, Leone in Pirandello's Rules of the Game, or Hamlet, Uncle Vanya or Prospero, gave Scofield a peculiar supremacy on the stage.

He once observed of stagecraft: "In a sense, you make music. You use the notes of a writer as a musician does, but the actor is, in effect, his own instrument. Whereas two violinists will always make the same tune from a row of notes, two actors will make different tunes from the same piece of text. This is not something you can learn in classes. It's actually doing it."

He was not, however, limited in range. He could play farce superbly, and could call upon a range of accents and a fine sense of timing and comic panic, all of which qualities were on display in his performance in, for example, The Government Inspector at the Aldwych. This gift for comedy was equally evident in his Witwoud in The Way of the World, his Aguecheek, Don Armado, and his Young Fashion in The Relapse.

Scofield's King Lear, for which he won another Evening Standard award, created an international stir in 1962-63 for its unsympathetic approach to the monarch and is considered by many to have been his greatest role. The play opened at Stratford before moving to London, Paris, Moscow and other European cities as well as to New York.

Sir Peter Hall once said of Scofield's work during this period: "He came as a real shock - you could suddenly feel this sulphurous passion. It was an entirely new note."

His Timon and Macbeth, in subsequent seasons for the Royal Shakespeare Company, were admired, as was his work for the National Theatre in its era at the Old Vic under Olivier - a notable performance came in The Captain of Kopenick. Olivier, however, is said to have been jealous of Scofield, rejecting him for a number of leading roles.

David Paul Scofield was born on January 21 1922 at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, one of three children of a village school headmaster. He was educated at Varndean School for Boys, Brighton, before going on to the London Mask Theatre School. He had first appeared on the stage (at Brighton's Theatre Royal, as one of the crowd in The Only Way) aged 15. His first professional appearance was in Desire Under The Elms at the Westminster in 1940.

Although Scofield sought to serve in the Army during the war, he was turned down on medical grounds, and instead spent the war years learning his craft with various repertory companies. In 1941 he joined the Bideford Repertory Theatre, touring with Ensa later that year in Shakespeare; in 1942 he was with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre for a few months before touring with the Travelling Repertory Theatre in Shaw and Shakespeare, returning to Birmingham for two seasons in 1944.

From there Scofield moved to what was then known as the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon, playing a number of leading and prominent roles. Two of these took him to London, where his Mercutio in Peter Brook's production of Romeo and Juliet drew the attention of the critics. Then it was back to Stratford to consolidate his reputation as the most promising of young actors, with a Hamlet - directed by Michael Benthall in Edwardian dress - which perfectly expressed Scofield's gifts for pensive melancholy and tentative sensibility.


Within a few seasons it appeared almost as though his powers would be limitless. His Konstantin in The Seagull, his Pierre in Venice Preserv'd, his Richard II, discovered in each role new depths. Kenneth Tynan declared that Scofield could achieve "a raptness in repose". This species of poised emotion, which somehow had the effect of keeping the spectator in a state of anxiety, was part of Scofield's unusually rich equipment.

Scofield performed with John Gielgud's company in the early 1950s, and in 1955 played a magnificent Hamlet (again for Peter Brook) in England and in Moscow (the first time an English-speaking company had played in the Russian capital since 1917). In 1958 he demonstrated his versatility with an acclaimed appearance as a singer's agent in the musical Expresso Bongo.

It was, though, something of a mystery that Scofield's career did not progress as most expected from the 1970s onwards. In the revival of The Madrass House, and as the composer Salieri in Amadeus, his performances were warmly received. In 1977 he played the title role in Volpone, Peter Hall's production for the National Theatre. It can be confidently said of Scofield that he never acted badly; but it sometimes appeared as if he could not find his place as a player as the years progressed. On the other hand, he was always extremely discriminating about the work he took on, and when he was 74 he observed: "As you get older, the more you know, the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger."

His work in the cinema was occasional. It was always thoughtful, and never degrading (which is more than can be said of several of his illustrious contemporaries and elders); yet it was never as exciting as it had been on stage in the 1950s and 1960s, in Shakespeare, Otway, Chekhov, Anouilh, Greene, Eliot, Zuckmayer and Pirandello.

After making his first film - That Lady (1955), in which he played Philip II of Spain - Scofield was offered a contract by a Hollywood studio, but declined. Among his subsequent pictures were Carve Her Name With Pride (1958); The Train (1964); King Lear (1971); A Delicate Balance (1973); and Henry V (1989). For his role as Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show (1994), directed by Robert Redford, he was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor. He won a Bafta for his role as Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible (1996).

On television he took a Bafta for his roles as Old Martin and Anthony in Martin Chuzzlewit (1994). He also appeared on the small screen in productions such as Anna Karenina (1985), The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988) and Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994).

Paul Scofield was appointed CBE in 1956 and CH in 2001.

He married, in 1943, the actress Joy Parker, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

[julian_craster]

March 21, 2008
Paul Scofield: The Times obituary
Towering actor who defined the role of King Lear for his era and won an Oscar in the film of A Man for All Seasons

Within the acting profession Paul Scofield was often referred to as “St Paul”. In part it was the appearance, always distinguished but in late middle age almost demanding veneration, with the brow and cheeks deeply lined. Scofield’s features at times had the look of a statue pitted by the wind and the rain. The weather-beaten face was a reflection of the long walks he was in the habit of taking across the downs near his Sussex home and around his Scottish summer retreat on the Isle of Mull.

Scofield was the reverse of the roistering British actors who were rarely out of the gossip columns for much of the 1950s and 1960s, the period when he was ensuring his own lasting reputation. He had no time for green-room chatter or thespian carousing. True to character he was a member of the Athenaeum rather than the Garrick. When work was done he made straight for his house in the country near Haywards Heath, which he had bought in 1953, and the company of his wife Joy, whom he had married almost ten years before that.

The nickname derived also from the large stage roles in which he excelled. These were often men who lived most of their lives towering above the rest of humanity but being finally brought down to earth in pieces. Of these roles his King Lear under Peter Brook’s direction at Stratford and at the Aldwych in 1962-63 is reckoned the supreme embodiment of his abilities in tragedy, and the greatest performance of that role of his era.

Perhaps more famous for the general public was his Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, played both in the theatre (1960) and on screen (1966), where his performance won him an Oscar. On stage there was a succession of Shakespeare’s captains and kings; lower down the social order but higher up the spiritual one came the whisky-priest in the adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, one of the parts which had cemented Scofield’s West End reputation in the 1950s. And finally, when he was well into his seventies, came the title role of John Gabriel Borkman in Ibsen’s tragedy at the National in 1996.

Beyond the physical presence there was the voice, an instrument that was totally unmistakable. It contained gravel and gravitas in equal measure, with each word meticulously articulated. When the Ghost spoke in Zeffirelli’s 1991 film of Hamlet it could only be Scofield, a famous Hamlet himself (under Brook’s direction) almost 40 years previously. On stage Scofield watched the audience intently to make sure that every syllable was registering.

Scofield was, on his own admission, simply an actor, preferably in London and preferably in the theatre. He made a number of films, some best forgotten and others approaching the class of A Man for All Seasons. There were television appearances, including a double as the Chuzzlewit brothers in the BBC’s Martin Chuzzlewit adaptation, and especially in later years quite a lot of radio work. But the theatre remained Scofield’s true home.

He had no desire, unlike so many of his colleagues, to become a director, nor despite an unrivalled number of major roles with the subsidised companies did he show any interest in administration or power. He served on boards for both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, but resigned from both. He saw himself solely as an interpreter of the words and thoughts of others and the results of this determination were the supreme vindication of it.

David Paul Scofield was born at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, and grew up in the county, where his father was headmaster of a primary school. He might have drawn on childhood memories when he played the academic, Mark van Doren, in Robert Redford’s film Quiz Show (1995), one his most successful cameo screen appearances.

At Varndean School for Boys, in Brighton, he played Juliet and Rosalind, but showed no interest in further education and left in his mid-teens. Brighton was close to home and with it the Theatre Royal, regular venue for pre-West End tours. Scofield used to turn up on Sunday nights when extras were being hired for walk-on parts in the week’s run about to start.

At l7 he went to the Croydon Repertory Theatre School and then to the London Mask Theatre School, run by John Fernald, who was later to take over RADA.

A foot disability precluded Scofield’s doing military service and during the Second World War he was an itinerant actor-student, learning what he could from whom he could. He did a turn with ENSA, but his first serious experience came with Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre, at the time one of the most productive cradles of British acting. It certainly had a powerful influence on Scofield. It was there he met both his future wife, Joy Parker, and the stage director who was to guide many of his key performances over the next 20 years, Peter Brook.

Together in Birmingham the two men caused a theatrical stir with one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays, King John, Scofield appearing as the Bastard. In 1946 they went on to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, then also running under Sir Barry Jackson’s aegis, and scored another double success with what was then, at any rate, another unpopular piece, Love’s Labours Lost. Scofield’s good looks and a bravura Henry V brought in the first of many Hollywood offers, which he was wise enough to reject. Had he not done so the Brook-Scofield partnership might never have flourished.


These early days were watched by a Birmingham boy, five years younger than Scofield and an embryo critic, Kenneth Tynan. He was to become one of the actor’s greatest admirers, one of the first to spot his talent and one of the few able to convey in words the minutiae of Scofield’s skills. Tynan did not temper his praise. Of Scofield’s Hamlet he wrote in a much quoted sentence: “I know now that there is in England a young actor who is bond-slave to greatness.” The theatre world was beginning to see Scofield as the natural successor to Olivier.

His seasons at Stratford also included Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Mephistophiles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and title roles in Troilus and Cressida and Pericles. Before that he had been in the West End in Christopher Fry’s slight and now almost forgotten play A Phoenix Too Frequent at the Arts.

His first important part in the commercial theatre was on a rather grander scale: Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story (1949), a part written especially for him. A totally different side of Scofield, sparkling and witty, was seen a year later when he played both twins, Hugo and Frederick, in Ring Round the Moon, a Christopher Fry adaptation of Anouilh, directed by Peter Brook at his frothiest.

In 1953 Scofield took the risk of joining John Gielgud’s company for a three-play classical season at the Lyric, Hammersmith. The move was partly justified. His Richard II, under Gielgud’s staid direction, did not create great excitement. His Sir Willfull Witwould in Congreve’s The Way of the World was better. But the hit of the season was Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d in which Gielgud and Scofield made one of their rare appearances together under Peter Brook’s guiding hand. It proved what a lot of theatre sages had been saying for a few years: Scofield worked best with Brook in command.


This proved to be the case when the two men, under the RSC banner, took Hamlet to Moscow in 1955, the first British company to visit Russia since the country had become the Soviet Union. The production was much admired by Guy Burgess, among others, as Alan Bennett was to note in his play An Englishman Abroad. It also probably gained Scofield appointment as CBE in 1956.

The partnership with Brook was further cemented by a season at the Phoenix in 1956. It was here he played the whisky-priest for Brook in The Power and the Glory — in Greene’s novel the preferred tipple is brandy. One critic described him as “ugly as a monkey furtive as a rat”. He was to return to Greene three years later in an original play, The Complaisant Lover. That Phoenix season also included Scofield’s first venture into T. S. Eliot, as Harry in a revival of The Family Reunion.

Scofield was in his mid-forties and experimenting by pushing his talent in different directions. He made his first film in 1955, That Lady, with Olivia de Havilland, a dreary costume drama about Philip II of Spain. He appeared in a musical, Expresso Bongo, about the pop industry, in which he was a seedy Tin Pan alley agent. That was marginally better.

Eventually in 1960 came the role which brought him the widest public acclaim: Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Scofield played it in the West End, on Broadway and finally, under Fred Zinnemann’s direction, on screen. He proved at last that he could be a great film actor. Minor pictures, such as Carve Her Name with Pride, which followed That Lady in 1958 had done little to enhance his reputation in that area.

The final collaboration with Brook, the title role in King Lear, came in 1962 and it was one of the finest. Scofield was probably at his acting peak at the time and his grizzled king, battered in body and rasping in voice, was seen all over the world under the RSC banner.

Thereafter Brook went off into the byways of theatre in the Middle East and elsewhere, routes which held no interest for the Sussex-nurtured Scofield. But he stayed with the RSC, under Peter Hall’s direction, playing parts as varied as Timon of Athens, Khlestakov in a jolly staging of Gogol’s The Government Inspector and a camp crimper in Charles Dyer’s The Staircase. They were days of high adventure at the RSC, which made full use of its London base, the Aldwych, and Scofield was very much part of them. The one misadventure was perhaps an ill-conceived Macbeth.

In the late 1960s Scofield moved across town to the Royal Court in Sloane Square. John Osborne’s Hotel in Amsterdam is not going to go down in history as one of his better plays, but Scofield did his best to give it some class, relishing acting in a small house where he was able to make eye contact with almost every member of the audience. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya there gave him much more opportunity and he reciprocated with one of his finest performances. There was a return to the Royal Court in 1973 in Christopher Hampton’s Savages.

Questions had long been asked about his non-appearance at the National. The title role in Coriolanus had been mooted, but it never happened. He eventually made his debut with the company during its last days at the Old Vic in 1971 with The Captain of Kopenick, directed by Frank Dunlop. But his real triumphs with the National were to come at the end of that decade when it was fully established on the South Bank under Hall.

The chief bait was the title role in Othello. But the production was regularly postponed and Scofield disappointed when it finally arrived in 1980. Before then there had been Volpone, The Madras House (1977), and best of all, under Hall’s own direction, the composer Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1979). Scofield’s performance was so good that many eyebrows were raised when in the film version the part went to the American actor F. Murray Abraham.

Scofield himself never betrayed any disappointment. Despite Sir Thomas More he experienced little pining for the screen. His enthusiasm was further diminished when he and his fellow actor, Robert Hardy, had a major accident when their coach overturned during the filming of The Shooting Party. The injured Scofield had to withdraw from the cast and the part went to James Mason. A later film, When the Whales Came (1989), failed to make much impact and towards the end of his career he was for the most part happy to confine himself to cameo roles. An exception was his Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible (1996), directed by Nicholas Hytner, which won him a Bafta award.

During his late sixties and early seventies Scofield became more and more choosy about the roles he played, and did not always choose wisely. Jeffrey Archer’s newspaper industry drama, Exclusive, came off after a short run. A comedy, I’m Not Rappaport, was generally considered not worthy of his talents. But Scofield seemed unconcerned about gradually fading from the public eye. He had remarked in his early sixties that he felt he had done enough Shakespeare, and he was content to sit at home in Sussex or on the Isle of Mull and wait for the right part to come along. Robert Redford tracked him down in Scotland for Quiz Show. Trevor Nunn enticed him to the Haymarket in 1992 for a powerful Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House. And finally came the return to the National in John Gabriel Borkman.

Scofield was thought to have refused a knighthood on several occasions, but in 2001 he accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour.

There were a son and daughter of his marriage, in 1943, to the actress Joy Parker.

Paul Scofield, CH, CBE, actor, was born on January 21, 1922. He died on March 19, 2008, aged 86

[Azanti]

He was a Tour De Force in acting, the only other British Actor whose voice was on a par with Richard Burton.