REMEMBRANCE
Sir Antony Sher, Out Gay Actor
Extraordinaire, Dies at 72
BY ANDY HUMM
When actor Antony
Sher, who died December
2 at 72, had
his breakout role as
Richard III in 1985, he won the
Olivier Award (London’s Tony) for
that and for originating the role of
Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch
Song Trilogy” in the West End that
same year. While Sher had a longterm
male partner at the time and
had already been part of the Gay
Sweatshop fringe theatre troupe
with out gay actor Simon Callow in
the 1970s, like most gay actors of
that time (and many still today) he
was not out publicly. He nevertheless
said in his acceptance speech,
“I’m very happy to be the fi rst actor
to win an award for playing both a
king and a queen.”
Sher would go on to distinguish
himself as one of the greatest classical
actors of our time at the Royal
Shakespeare Company (RSC)
starting in 1982. When he played
Shylock in 1987, he met Gregory
Doran in the production and soon
partnered with him romantically
and they became a famous out
gay couple. Doran went on to become
a director — often of Sher
— and eventually artistic director
of the RSC until he took a leave of
absence in September to care for
Sher, ill with terminal cancer, in
his fi nal months. The men were
the fi rst same-sex couple to get a
civil partnership in the UK in 2005
and they married when it became
legal ten years later.
I had the privilege of seeing his
Falstaff and King Lear here at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music
and his Prospero, a production in
London of “The Tempest” refl ective
of his South African roots. I also
saw him in an intimate revival of
Arthur Miller’s “Broken Glass” at
the Tricycle Theatre in London as
a confl icted Jew in the US during
the time of Hitler’s rise. But nowhere
was his brilliance, heart,
and soul more on display than in
his own adaptation of the searing
memoir of Holocaust survivor Primo
Levi (1919-1987), “If This is a
Mimi Ndiweni and Sir Antony Sher in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of “King Lear.”
Man,” about how he survived Nazi
barbarism in Auschwitz.
Sher wrote the one-man play
“Primo” and then had to get permission
to perform it from Levi’s
estate. It was a fraught negotiation.
They agreed to let Sher do it in London,
New York, and South Africa
and then not make it available for
anyone else to perform ever again.
They did allow it to be fi lmed and
his performance is available on
DVD and on-demand on Amazon
Prime.
“Primo” opens with Levi saying,
“It was my good fortune to be deported
to Auschwitz only in 1944.”
What could he possibly mean? And
while the descriptions of dehumanization
and torture that follow
are harrowing, his relatively late
arrival at the death camp did play
a role in surviving its nightmares.
Sher came on our Gay USA cable
show to talk about his journey
with the role during his Broadway
run in 2005. And while he was
better known for playing ferocious
Shakespeare characters from Iago
to Lear to Macbeth, this quiet role
from this gentle man packed just
as much power if not more.
While Sher was much less well
known for his fi lm work, what he
did was compelling. As an accomplished
stage actor he nailed small
roles as British Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli to Queen Victoria
(Judi Dench) in “Mrs. Brown”
(1997) and as the psychiatrist Moth
in “Shakespeare in Love” (1998),
which also featured Callow.
But just as the AIDS pandemic
was cresting in 1995, in the movie
“Alive and Kicking” he took on the
role of a gay social worker who has
an affair with a beautiful young
dancer (Jason Flemyng) who is dying
of AIDS but angrily fi ghts the
limits it puts on his art — a powerful
and brave work by Martin
Sherman, who also did “Bent.”
Sher was born on June 14, 1949
in Cape Town, South Africa and
moved to England at 19. He told
The Guardian, “I looked around me
and I didn’t see any Jewish leading
men in the classical theatre, so I
thought it best to conceal my Jewishness.
Also, I quickly became
conscious of apartheid when I arrived
here, and I didn’t want to be
known as a white South African…
Then there was my sexuality. The
theatre was full of gay people, but
none of them were out… Each of
these things went into the closet
until my entire identity was in the
closet.”
But as he grew as an actor and
as a person, he embraced his
gay and Jewish identities, took
roles refl ecting them, and joined
the fi ght against apartheid back
ISAAC JAMES ©RSC
home, among many other civil
rights causes. He also embraced
painting as a therapy to overcome
a cocaine addiction. And he was
an award-winning writer including
“The Year of the King” (1985),
about his work on “Richard III,”
which has become an actor’s bible
along with his later takes on doing
Falstaff and Lear.
Sher was knighted for his services
to theater in 2000. His husband
Doran, also knighted, told
The Guardian, “On stage he was
volcanic, but off he was quiet,
thoughtful, and not terribly outgoing
and maybe that was attractive
to me.” Veteran critic Michael
Billington called him “a man of
staggering versatility.” Helen Mirren
wrote she was “devastated” by
his passing and recalled their fi rst
encounter at the read-through of
a David Hare play in the 1970s: “I
read the fi rst words of our scene
together and he answered. I raised
my eyes above the pages to look at
him more precisely, as with simply
those minimal words I immediately
realized I was opposite a great
actor.”
Harvey Fierstein posted on Facebook,
“Brilliant, kind, funny, actor,
writer, painter Antony Sher is
gone. I was honored to have him
star in TORCH SONG TRILOGY in
London. Poorer us.”
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