He won a scholarship to the capital’s Royal High School and went on to study architecture at Edinburgh University. ″It was clear that he was exhausted but his courage, not only in being on that stage but giving us the performance of his life, left our applause and cheers seeming very inadequate.″Ĭharleson, the son of a printer, was born in Edinburgh Aug. ″After nearly four hours on stage he was given a standing ovation,″ Whitehall said. His last performance came just nine weeks ago.
This is a terrible tragedy for the British theater.″
Mark Fisher, an opposition Labor Party spokesman on the arts, said Charleson’s widely acclaimed performance as Hamlet ″indicated that an enormous career lay ahead of him. ″He was the most unmannered and unactorish of actors: always truthful, always honest,″ fellow actor Ian McKellen said Sunday night.Ĭharleson also was a beautiful singer who ″had the most pure tenor I’ve ever heard,″ McKellen said in an interview. He also appeared in the 1982 Oscar-winning film ″Gandhi″ as Charlie Andrews, the priest who was a friend of Indian independence leader Mohandas K. The film won the Academy Award for best picture.
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He said the cause of death was septicemia, a disease caused by microorganisms in the blood.Ĭharleson, who received critical praise for a series of stage roles, achieved international fame in the 1981 film ″Chariots of Fire″ in which he played Eric Liddell, a Scottish missionary and runner who refused to compete on a Sunday. The Scottish actor, who recently played ″Hamlet″ at London’s National Theater, died at his home in London on Saturday evening ″following a courageous struggle with the AIDS virus,″ Michael Whitehall said. The idea, he said, was to explore how meaning was carried by the musical and rhythmic aspects of the spoken word.LONDON (AP) _ Actor Ian Charleson, who starred in the film ″Chariots of Fire″ as an Olympic runner whose religious faith took precedence over his desire to compete, has died of complicatons from AIDS, his agent said Sunday. But painted sets and declaiming actors bored him, so he founded The International Centre for Theater Research, a Paris organization dedicated to experimenting with avant-garde notions - taking actors to a mountaintop in Iran to perform a play in an invented language that no one present actually understood. At 7 he reportedly performed his own four-hour version of Hamlet and by his early 20s, he was directing at Stratford, one of the world's great classical stages. He didn't much care for formal education, but even as a child he managed to live and breathe culture. Peter Stephen Paul Brook was born in London to Russian-Jewish parents. "If you can juggle all the time with those two balls," Brook told NPR, "somewhere in between, where they meet, you sometimes can have a flash of what seems like truth." Letting His Work Speak For Itself For that production, he took the colorful, stylized conventions of East Indian theater and anchored them in performance with things hard, practical and real - fire, earth and water. "But as the mad people came and parodied the audience's applause, it was I think a valuable moment of deliberate discomfort because suddenly they saw, yes, but it's not any old show, this show is about something."īrook chose to cast child non-actors in his 1963 film adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.Īnd he played with form far more aggressively in his theater work, searching for a down-to-earthiness he described in his book The Empty Space and made literal in his nine-hour adaptation of The Mahabharata. "When the audience applauded, they were naturally applauding the actors, applauding the show," Brook told NPR in 1992. As the audience cheered, the cast, still twitching and drooling, squelched a standing ovation each night by applauding back mockingly from the lip of the stage, not dropping character until every audience member had left the theater. Even Marat/Sade's curtain call was provocative. The film version starred Ian Richardson as imprisoned radical Jean-Paul Marat.īut all those words didn't prepare audiences for the freak show Brook had devised: drooling maniacs in rags rubbing elbows with audience members, shrieking from the stage and ending the night's political diatribe in a full-scale riot. Brook adapted his Marat/Sade theater production for the screen in 1967.