Bruce Purchase: Potent presence on the British stage
INDEPENDENT
Thursday, 12 June 2008


A large-scale personality, burly and often bearded, and blessed with a richly expressive voice, Bruce Purchase could be a remarkably potent presence on stage.

Born in New Zealand, he won a scholarship to study acting in England. After training at Rada he worked in repertory, including a spell at Liverpool Playhouse, before auditioning successfully for Laurence Olivier, then assembling his first National Theatre Company at the Old Vic. Purchase appeared initially in walk-on roles or understudying but soon made his mark; he was especially impressive as a cockily cunning Balthasar in Franco Zeffirelli's exuberant version of Much Ado About Nothing (1965) with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens.

Purchase also spent some time as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, although he was rarely given worthwhile roles, and he was part of a distinguished company at the Mermaid Theatre for a revelatory The Tempest (1970) directed by Jonathan Miller as an allegory of early colonialism (Ariel, Caliban and the goddesses – singing the Masque to brilliant Monteverdi pastiche from Carl Davies – were all outstanding black performers) with Graham Crowden a mesmerising Prospero and Purchase an intriguingly smiling and duplicitous Sebastian.

The Mermaid's gloriously eccentric and sometimes wayward founder-director Bernard Miles took greatly to Purchase. Miles had a long-nourished dream to repeat his 1940s Iago (to the Moor of the great émigré Frederick Valk) and cast Purchase in the title role of Othello (1971).

He had the right commanding physique and voice for the role, but it was Purchase's misfortune – as he would on occasion gleefully recall – to find himself as the centre of a woefully inept and appallingly designed production. Far too old for Iago ("ancient" took on an unfortunately literal meaning), with a wig which kept slipping to expose the strips of Sellotape attempting to hold back his jowls, Miles was at his most quixotically impossible.

Noting the poor box-office advance prior to opening, Miles artfully drummed up acres of feverish press coverage by demanding that Desdemona appear nude in her death scene (insisting, on dubious textual "evidence", even when taxed with the fact that Shakespeare's heroines were first played by boys, that "the Bard" had intended this). Unfortunately, amidst the brouhaha, Purchase's body make-up – he must have been one of the last white actors to play the role in London – proved ineffective, staining not only the bed sheets but also Desdemona's naked body with large black smudges (subsequently the sheets were changed to black).

In his later years Purchase had a major stage success with John Wain's solo drama Johnson is Leaving (Stratford, 2003), based on Wain's biography of the Great Cham, and it met with similar success on various global tours.

Television work – I, Claudius, Rumpole of the Bailey and Doctor Who included – saw Purchase often cast in strong supporting roles .

He also proved a talented artist, enjoying several solo and mixed exhibitions; he also wrote a spirited account of his New Zealand upbringing and English theatrical life in his book Changing Skies (2007). He was married for 15 years to the fiction writer Elspeth Sandys; for the last five years his partner was Sara Hebblethwaite, an arts consultant.

The Last Confession (tour and Haymarket, 2007), the Vatican-set drama of papal intrigue, with David Suchet heading a markedly strong, mostly male cast, saw Purchase's final theatrical appearance.

Alan Strachan

Bruce Purchase, actor: born Thames, New Zealand 2 October 1938; married 1965 Elspeth Sandys (marriage dissolved); died London 5 June 2008.

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From The Times
June 11, 2008
Bruce Purchase: character actor, member of the National Theatre company

Bruce Purchase was a burly character actor who came to Britain from his native New Zealand and had a busy career on the stage, on television and in films. Better known as a face than a name, he was mostly a supporting player who could turn his hand to anything from Shakespeare to popular television drama.

Purchase was born in Thames, New Zealand, in 1938, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In the early 1960s he was a founder member of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company, appearing in the inaugural production of Hamlet at the Old Vic with Peter O’Toole, as well as The Recruiting Officer, Saint Joan and The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

He was later in several touring productions for the National, paying Balthazar in Much Ado about Nothing, David Bliss in Hay Fever and Edward IV in Richard III. He was later with the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking the title role in Arden of Feversham, a 16th-century tragedy based on a murder case, as well as supporting parts in Richard II, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida.

The bigger roles came outside the big national companies, including Othello at the Mermaid Theatre and Macbeth at Theatr Clwyd. He played Doolittle in My Fair Lady to Richard Chamberlain’s Higgins on a European tour and took the title role in a New Zealand production of Uncle Vanya.

On television he played the Captain in a 1978 Doctor Who story, The Pirate Planet, with Tom Baker as the Doctor, and was Parson Augustus Bull in A Horseman Riding By, a 13-part saga of English rural life based on novels by R. F. Delderfield. He played the Earl of Northumberland in the BBC Shakespeare production of the two parts of Henry IV.

Elsewhere on television he was the Duke of Buckingham in The First Churchills (1969), Sabinus in the BBC’s landmark I, Claudius (1976) and was Tommy Roach in the 1979 ITV production of Quatermass. But much of his TV work consisted of single appearances in long-running series such as Callan, Softly Softly, Rumpole of the Bailey, Casualty and The Bill.

Among his many films were Othello (1965), from the National Theatre production starring Olivier, Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Mary Queen of Scots with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson and, more recently, Richard III, set in the 1930s with Ian McKellen. One of his last film roles was the barrister Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett in Another Life (2001), based on the famous Thompson and Bywaters murder case.

In 2003 he played Dr Samuel Johnson in the first production of Johnson is Leaving for the RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Based by John Wain on his biography of Johnson, it was specially written for Purchase, after the two men met in Oxford, and later performed by him around the world.

He became seriously ill last year while appearing in The Last Confession, a thriller based around the death, after only 33 days in office, of Pope John Paul I. Starring David Suchet, it opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre in May 2007 and transferred to the West End a few months later. Purchase played a cardinal.

He was also a talented artist who exhibited in London and abroad. His autobiography, Changing Skies, was published shortly before his death. He is survived by his partner, Sara Hebblethwaite.

Bruce Purchase, actor, was born in 1938. He died of cancer on June 8, 2008, aged 69