‘I was in so many closets,’ he later said. He enrolled at the less prestigious Webber-Douglas Academy, and hid his South African background, his Jewishness and his sexuality. In 1968 he left for England, hoping to sail into drama school and emulate his theatrical heroes Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.īut Rada flatly rejected him, Sher later recalling that the venerable theatre school sent him a letter that read: ‘Not only have you failed this audition, we strongly urge you to seek a different career.’ Gay, Jewish and artistic, he was a poor fit in the macho and sports-mad culture of apartheid-era South Africa. He would listen again and again to catch the cadences in an LP of Laurence Olivier playing Othello. ‘If it’s Shakespeare dialogue, the taste will be Michelin-starred.’Īctor Sir Antony Sher (right) with Greg Doran outside Islington Town Hall, North London, Wednesday December 21, 2005, after their civil partnership ceremonyīorn in a middle-class suburb of Cape Town in 1949, the ‘weedy’ young Anthony was obsessed with drama. If it’s good dialogue, the taste will be distinctive. ‘You hold it in your mouth, you taste it. ‘To an actor, dialogue is like food,’ he wrote.

But otherwise, Shakespeare served me very well.’įor Sher language was a performance art. ‘There was an old-fashioned idea that he had to be tall and handsome and blond.

‘I thought I wasn’t what Hamlet looked like,’ he said.

Only Hamlet was omitted, with Sher saying – with characteristic insecurity – that a sense of ‘self-oppression’ prevented him from treading the boards as the Dane. Sher, whose death from cancer aged 72 was announced yesterday, was widely acknowledged as the greatest actor of his generation, and over the course of his 50-year career, played nearly every major Shakespearean role. Antony Sher (pictured) as Sir John Falstaff and Alex Hassell as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I and II by William Shakespeare

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