The Stage 13th May 2026
Nick Smurthwaite
Actor who performed extensivly with the Royal Shakespeare Company before co-founding the English Shakespeare Company
The enticements of film and television were frequently brushed aside by Michael Pennington in favour of the stage.
In 1980, he found himself in the running to play the male lead in The French Lieutenant’s Woman but chose instead to accept an invitation from the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Hamlet. He told The Stage in 2021: “In the end, I decided there would be other films, but there might not be another opportunity to play Hamlet for the RSC.”
His lifelong affair with Shakespeare began in 1954 when he was 11. His father Vivian, a corporate lawyer took him to the Old Vic to see Paul Rogers playing Macbeth. He recalled: “I was hooked immediately. It was discovering rock’n’roll..”
At the time, the Old Vic was working its way through the entire Shakespeare canon, and the young Pennington resolved to see every production. Despite having mixed feelings about the prospect of his only son entering such a precarious profession, Pennington senior built him an elaborate model theatre in the garden, complete with miniature lighting circuit and fly tower.
Being at Cambridge at the same time as Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre did nothing to quell his passion. He played Hamlet for the first time in his final year at university and Estragon in an award-winning production of Waiting for Godot, named best fringe show at Edinburgh in 1963.
The Stage also marked him out as one to watch as early as 1967, featuring him in the weekly ‘rising star’ spot and noting his “striking performance” as a scene-stealing young barrister in John Mortimer’s play The Judge in the West End.
Unlike many of his peers, Pennington never attended drama school but walked straight into a job with the RSC, carrying spears, landing the occasional role such as Fortinbras in David Warner’s groundbreaking 1965 Hamlet, and basking in the proximity of great stage actors including Peggy Ashcroft, Ian Richardson and Paul Scofield.
He toured the US playing Laertes to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet, during which time he became Williamson’s drinking buddy, often required to manage the older man’s excesses. Soon after their return to the UK Pennington landed a breakthrough role in Captain Jack’s Revenge at the Royal Court, he was also in Christopher Hampton’s play Savages (1973), with Paul Scofield and Tom Conti.
The same year, convinced that his rightful place was in classical theatre, he rejoined the RSC, becoming one of the younger generation of stage stars that included Judi Dench, Francesca Annis, ian McKellan, Ian McDiarmid and Jane Lapotaire. He was the sexually convincing Angelo in Measure For Measure (1974) oopposite Annis, and a dashing Mirabell to Dench’s Millamant in The Way of the world (1978). This run of outstanding performances culmiiinated in John Barton’s 1980 production of Hamlet, recently described by the critic Michael Biillington, who was there, as “brilliant…sharp-brained, sweet-souled and mellifluous of voice in the Gielgud tradition”.
Seeking more control over his destiny, in 1986 Pennington teamed up with director Michael Bogdanov to form the English Shakespeare Company which enabled him to play all the great roles in the history plays, along with Macbeth and Coriolanus. For the next six years, they toured constantly, at home and abroad. He told The Stage: “Initially, we were going to do a modern play, but when we met up with the Arts Council, they said they wouldn’t give us money to do that, but they would give us money to tour Shakespeare’s entire history cycle in the UK because nobody gets to see them. I couldn’t have been happier.”
It also enabled Pennington to try his hand at directing, with a Spanish-themed Twelfth Night which went on to be produced in Chicago and Tokyo.
In a career of astonishing versatility, there were two constants - his one-man shows about Shakespeare and Chekhov, the two writers he had revered since childhood. Sweet William, which is available on DVD, is a personal celebration of the man and his work. Anton Chekhov, first seen at the National in 1984, takes the form of an evening in the company of the great Russian writer towards the end of his life. Looking uncannily like Chekhov, Pennington offered his thoughts on a variety of subjects, from insomnia to womanising, encounters with Tolstoy and a harrowing visit to a Siberian prison camp, all gleaned from the writer’s stories, letters, plays and assorted biographies.
Just before lockdown in 2020, he achieved a long-held ambition to play Prospero in a pared-down production of The Tempest at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre, London. The Stage called it “a sonorous and compelling performance” and “an intriguingly nuanced take on one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters”.
There were, of course TV credits such as Ladislaw in the BBC’s 1968 adaptation of Middlemarch, and Jung in the 1984 series, Freud, but feature films were few and far between, although, to his amusement, he was best known in the US for his role Moff Jerjerrod, the Death Star station commander, in Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi.
When he wasn’t acting, Pennington invariably had a book on the go. These included practical guides to acting (and understanding) Shakespeare, Chekhov and Strindberg, and three memoirs, Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to be an Actor (2015); King Lear in Brooklyn (2016); and most recently, In My Own Footsteps:A Memoir (2021). (Note: You can hear Michael reading this on Audible)
Michael Pennington ws born on the 7th June 1943, died on the 7th May, aged 82. He is survived by his son, Mark, from his marriage to Katherine Barker, which ended in 1967. His longtime partner, Prue Skene, the arts administrator died in March Last year.