TRIBUTE
A HEROIC STYLE AND A RECORD OF TRIUMPH
Michael Billington
The Guardian
12th May 2026
Michael Pennington was an actor of astonishing range, a wise writer and witty companion
Michael Pennington was what Richard II - a part he played with great distinction - called a “well-graced actor”. He had a resonant voice, a handsome countenance, a security and ease on stage. But looking back over his career, at his death at the age of 82, I am struck by its variety.
He co-founded, with Michael Bogdanov, the English Shakespeare Company. He toured the world with one-man shows on Shakespeare and Chekhov. He directed here and abroad and wrote 10 books full of practical wisdom. On top of that, he was witty and delightful company.
His acting career falls into distinctive phases. He spent much of the 1960s and 70s with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where many performances stand out. His Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1978 was a man hooked on the sublime rhetoric of love. For the same director, John Barton, in 1980 he was a brilliant Hamlet: sweet-souled and mellifluous of voice in the Gielgud tradition.
He later moved to the National Theatre, where in Venice Preserv’d he and Ian McKellan recaptured a heroic style of acting, and where in Strider: The Story of a Horse he endowed the equine protagonist with a pedigree dignity through a light-stepping walk on the balls of his feet.
Like many intelligent actors, Pennington yearned to be something more than a hired hand, which led him to work alongside Bogdanov in forming and running the English Shakespeare Company. He played a huge variety of parts, from Henry V and Coriolanus to Buckingham ad Jack Cade. He also helped to forge the style of a company he once described as both progressive and nostalgic:in that each production was grounded in current political argument, but nostalgic in that the company itself were touring rogues and vagabonds, once dubbed a “rock’n’roll” Shakespeare outfit.
But there were multiple facets to Pennington’s kaleidoscopic career. Although associated with the classics, he was accomplished in modern drama. He instinctively understood the work of Harold Pinter, and in the Gate Theatre Dublin’s 1994 Pinter Festival gave memorable performances as the steely interrogator in One For the Road and the disintegrating Deeley in Old Times. In Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides and Collaboration, he endowed the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler with a wounded hauteur and the composer Richard Strauss with a fierce obsessiveness.
While a company man, Pennington also performed two striking solo shows. As an ardent Russophile, his portrait of Anton Chekhov caught all the great writer’s contradictoriness.
Pennington’s Sweet William was similarly the product of a lifetime’s love of Shakespeare. Combining textual scholarship with performance skills. It offered in two hours a rounded portrait of Shakespeare and his art.
But there was nothing slavish about Pennington’s passion for Shakespeare. I remember once doing a platform talk at the National Theatre in which I repeated my familiar doubts about King Lear: about its structural problems and its human impossibilities. As I was doing a book signing after the talk, Pennington edged up to me and said: “Michael, can I have a quick word with you about King Lear?” I hesitantly agreed, expecting a scholarly rebuke. “I’ve been in the play three times and even played Lear himself and I totally agree with you.” How could I not love him after that?
The Guardian
12th May 2026, Kevin Rawlinson
The actor, Michael Pennington, known for his Shakespeare work and his role in the original Star Wars trilogy, has died at the age of 82.
Pennington’s agent, Lesley Duff announced his death yesterday “after a long and wonderful life and career”.
Pennington, an Associate Artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company, founder and ran the English Shakespeare Company with the theatre director Michael Bogdanov.
Fellow actor Miriam Margolyes remembered him as an “old friend from Cambridge days, a very fine actor, brilliant, wise, clear”.
Pennington was celebrated for Shakespearean roles including Hamlet, Mercutio and Macbeth, as well as King Lear, Richard II and Henry V. He also appeared in Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Angelo, Leontes and Jack Cade across a 60-year career.
Giving the 2004 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, Pennington described how he first developed a fascination with the playwright’s work. “Shakespeare verse hit me like a hammer when I was 11. It was Macbeth, rolling off the stage of the Old Vic: ‘My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.’ The yellow leaf? It was the beginning o9f winter and this was familiar - it was what I had shuffled through a coupe of hours before in our street in north London under the equally yellow streetlamps, on my home from school.”
Pennington appeared in more than 70 onscreen productions, including Return of the Jedi, as the Death Star officer Moff Jerjerrod. He also appeared opposite Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady.
National Theatre Face Book, 13th May 2026
We are sad to learn of the passing of celebrated actor and theatre maker Michael Pennington.
In 1984 he starred in three productions at the National Theatre: Strider - The Story of a Horse directed by his long time collaborator Michael Bogdanov; Venice Preserv’d by Thomas Otway; and Anton Chekhov, a play written, directed and performed by Michael himself.
Hugely admired by audiences, Michael also featured in many National Theatre Platform events between 1991 and 2018.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time.