Shakespeare Magazine 07

Great Shakespeare Actors
him with in that way is Laurence Olivier,
whom I did see. And I would say that the
greatest performance I’ve seen myself is
Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus here in 1959,
when Edith Evans was also fine as Volumnia.
She was a little bit old for the role but she gave
a great performance too.”
Tell us about some of your
personal favourites.
“I’ve been lucky to see and indeed to know
some of the great actors. Donald Sinden was
a friend. One who there’s a rather sad story
about is Richard Pasco who died not long ago.
He lived not far from here, I talked to him a
lot when he was here, and I did talks with him
and Ian Richardson, especially when they were
playing Richard II, when they were alternating
the roles of Richard and Bolingbroke in John
Barton’s great production here.
“I knew that Dickie had Alzheimer’s and I
happened to see his wife Barbara Leigh-Hunt,
herself a very fine Shakespeare performer, and
I said ‘I’ve just written an essay about him’. She
said could she read it, so I sent her the book.
After he died she told me that she read the
essay to him twice. She said that it moved him
to tears. He wasn’t able to remember a word of
it an hour afterwards, but I was so pleased that
I had both written it and sent it to him.”
You mentioned that some actors
would be great if they kept their
mouths shut. How does it divide
between the physicality, the voice
and other things?
“What are the qualities that go towards
making a great Shakespeare actor? They
include presence, the ability to stand still, the
ability to be silent, to listen silently, the ability
to speak eloquently, movement, gesture are
all important. But ultimately there’s a quality
which is indefinable and which sometimes
defies the rules. Henry Irving was clearly a
very great actor, but he had a terrible voice
and his diction was very eccentric. There are
a lot of rather funny remarks that I quote
about Irving’s diction, from Henry James for
example. Even Ellen Terry, his partner – in
acting and in real life too – in her wonderful
“Coleridge said that seeing
Kean act Shakespeare was
like reading Shakespeare
by flashes of lightning”
book of memoirs has a transcript of an
American journalist’s attempt to transcribe
Irving’s very eccentric pronunciation.
“So ultimately there’s a quality which you
can’t define, a quality of genius, the quality
of responding to the language. In our own
time Judi Dench has it, for example. She is
somebody who is more technically perfect and
adept than some of the others. There’s also
this quality of imagination, the ability to think
yourself into a role.
“And yet there’s a lovely quotation from
Donald Sinden about how when he was
playing Malvolio he had both to be inhabiting
the character but at the same time to be
standing aside from the character. He said that
if at any point he actually became Malvolio he
lost control over the audience. And I think that
is a good definition of the way that an actor
has to be both in and out of the part at the
same time.”
It must have been hard to make
your final selection…
“Because of the difficulty of choosing, among
living actors especially, I’ve dedicated the book
‘to all the great Shakespeare actors who are not
in this book’, which I hope is tactful…”
Great Shakespeare Actors by Stanley Wells
is available from Oxford University Press,
priced £16.99
William Shakespeare: A Very Short
Introduction by Stanley Wells is also available
from Oxford University Press, priced £7.99
SHAKESPEARE magazine 15