Michael Pennington, the actor and writer who has died aged 82, chose to give his Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company in preference to starring opposite Meryl Streep in a major Hollywood film.
In 1980 Pennington, already an accomplished and experienced Shakespearean actor, turned down the male lead in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, saying: “I realised I couldn’t let Hamlet go. It is one of the prizes.” The RSC directorJohn Bartonhad broached the possibility of casting him back in 1975. He described Pennington as “a very fine actor… He’s the person I most want to do Hamlet with.”
Following in the illustrious footsteps of Pennington’s hero, Laurence Olivier, his performance, acclaimed for its intelligence and flawless diction, brought a new depth of sensitivity to Shakespeare’s beleaguered prince. Like Olivier, whose film he had seen as a schoolboy, Pennington was also to become closely, and famously, associated with the play.
He first took the role in a university production, and in 1965Peter Hallcast him as Fortinbras in the RSC production starringDavid Warneras Hamlet. Later, in 1969, Pennington was cast in the Roundhouse’s Hamlet, playing Laertes oppositeNicol Williamson’s lead. Pennington transferred with the play to New York, despite differences with its director, the flamboyant Tony Richardson. In typical self-deprecating style, Pennington said later that his threat not to accompany the play to New York would most likely have had very little impact on Richardson.
In 1994, he was cast in the Peter Hall Company’s production of Hamlet in which he played Claudius and The Ghost. The play achieved a West End run at the Globe (later the Gielgud) theatre, and 1996 saw the publication of Pennington’s book Hamlet: A User’s Guide. He wrote a further two titles in the same series to accompany Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington was born in Cambridge on June 7 1943, the son of Vivian Pennington, a lawyer from Wales, and his Scottish wife Euphemia, née Fyfe. He was educated at Marlborough and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. It was as a Marlborough schoolboy that Michael decided upon a career as an actor after seeingPaul Rogersin Macbeth .
Unlike many of his peers, Pennington never went to drama school, and after graduating in 1964 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as a bit-player – the proverbial spear-carrier. He then moved from the RSC to try his hand at other, non-classical, roles. By 1974, and back at the RSC, he took on other Shakespearean roles including Angelo in Measure for Measure and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost. There were also parts in plays by David Rudkin, David Edgar and William Congreve.
In addition to his work in the theatre, Pennington was also a screen actor, and in 1976 he starred alongside Rex Harrison’s granddaughter, Cathryn Harrison, in the BBC’s production of The Witches of Pendle. The feature-length television play should have been filmed on location at Lancaster Castle, which was still a working Crown Court. But because of security surrounding an IRA trial, filming had to be moved to Hoghton Tower, an ancient manor house on the outskirts of Preston, where, coincidentally, William Shakespeare is said to have spent time with the de Hoghton family between the years 1580 and 1581.
His career continued to flourish. His prolific body of work also included the staging of his one-man show, Anton Chekhov, which Pennington both devised and performed. He took the production, which was based on the writings of the playwright, round schools and toured the world with it. In 1984, the BBC devoted an edition of Omnibus to the show. A related book by Pennington, Are you there Crocodile? Inventing Anton Chekhov, made the shortlist of the 2003 Theatre Book Prize.
In 1986 he collaborated with the theatre directorMichael Bogdanovto form The English Shakespeare Company. The aim of the new theatre company was to take larger-scale classical productions on tour. Two of the English Shakespeare Company’s sponsors were Ed and David Mirvish of the Old Vic, where as a lad Pennington had discovered Shakespeare for the first time. He played two more of Shakespeare’s most famous men: Hal and Henry V, in Henry IV parts I and II and Henry V at the Old Vic.
The troupe also took their celebrated Wars of the Roses cycle on three world tours, with Pennington taking, among others, the roles of Richard II and Henry V, and receiving an Olivier nomination. Earlier nominations had been in 1984 for Strider – The Story of a Horse at the National and for his Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (RSC, 1976). In 1990 Pennington and Bogdanov published The English Shakespeare Company: The Story of the Wars of the Roses.
In 1996 Pennington again followed Olivier by playing Archie Rice in Stephen Rayne’s production of The Entertainer at the Watermill Theatre, Bagnor. Pennington’s studied portrayal of the seedy comic gained him more critical acclaim and a new skill: tap dancing. He could be heard practising his steps around Jill Fraser’s picturesque venue, where he was given the use of a private flat. The rest of the company stayed, as was usual at the Watermill, in a special cast house next door.
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Among Pennington’s other much-praised productions were Peter Hall’s Major Barbara and The Misanthrope (both at Piccadilly Theatre, 1998), Timon of Athens (RSC, 1999), What the Butler Saw (touring, 2001), The Seagull (King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 2003), Nathan the Wise (Hampstead Theatre, 2005) and The Best of Friends (Hampstead and touring, 2006).
He followed up his Chekhov one-man show in 2007 with another hit solo production, this time a portrait of Shakespeare titled Sweet William, which he also toured, taking it round the UK and the US and as far afield as Argentina and Uruguay. As Ibsen’s Master Builder at Chichester in 2010 he won universal plaudits for the way he dominated the stage, at the height of his powers.
At the age of 70 Pennington went to New York to play King Lear in Brooklyn, in the Theatre for a New Audience’s production. His performance was ecstatically received by American critics, with Ben Brantley of The New York Times hailing it as “devastating”.
In 2020, as the glitzier West End theatres dimmed their lights for the first Covid lockdown, for a few nights Pennington tackled Prospero in a pared-down production of The Tempest in a tiny studio space, the Jermyn Street Theatre. It was the one big Shakespearean role he had not attempted in his 50-year career and, reviewing it in The Daily Telegraph, Clare Allfree wrote that “it felt positively end of days. Lines such as ‘The solemn temples, the great globe itself/Yea, all which it shall inherit shall dissolve’ seemed to acquire, in Pennington’s hypnotically sonorous delivery, a charge of almost unbearable poignancy.”
Outstanding supporting work of his later years included Antigonus (gaining him a fourth Olivier nomination) in The Winter’s Tale (Garrick, 2015) with Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh, and Dogsborough in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Donmar, 2017), with Lenny Henry as the ruthless racketeer.
Pennington was untroubled by the fact that he was best known, at least in America, to fans of the Star Wars franchise, who cherished his performance as the Death Star station commander Moff Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi. “Let’s not make too much of it,” he told an tnterviewer in 2003, “but I’ve done 20 years of plays since, and people still write for autographs, saying, ‘If you ever do any more acting, please let us know.’ ”
That was a rare film role; more frequent were television appearances, ranging from Will Ladislaw in the BBC’s 1968 Middlemarch to Jung in the six-part serial Freud (1984); more recently, he brought weight to small roles in The Bill, The Tudors and Father Brown, among other TV mainstays.
Pennington’s bold, clear tones were often sought to provide narration for documentaries and audio books, including, for Penguin Classics, Dickens’s Hard Times, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Sigmund Freud’s The Unconscious, as well as his memoir, In My Own Footsteps, which he published in 2021.
His other books on acting included Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to Be an Actor (2015), in which he tried to demystify the craft.
A warm and pleasant man, Michael Pennington enjoyed the company of fellow actors and took his turn in cooking a meal for everyone, proving himself an accomplished chef. At one time he liked to hand out jars of his homemade quince butter.
Michael Pennington married, in 1964, Katharine Barker; they had one son. The marriage was dissolved in 1967. His partner, the arts administratorPrue Skene, died last year.
Michael Pennington, born June 7 1943, death announced May 10 2026
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