by James Laurenson, who has died aged 84 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was on TV, extending from a short stint as the Rev Peter Hope in Coronation. Street in 1968 to Sir John Weir, the royal physician, in The Crown (2016).
He arrived by boat from New Zealand in the early 1960s – as did many artists from those islands, and from Australia, at that time – and by 1964 he was boarding with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford- upon-Avon and London.
In the late 1960s he toured with Prospect Theater Company during their 1969 visit to the Edinburgh festival, where Ian McKellen became an overnight star playing Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, a play that was not was shown professionally at that time for more than 300 years.
In Edward II, Laurenson played the king’s favorite, Piers Gaveston, who meets an untimely end (finally) from a vicious red-hot poker. That came after scenes of erotic intensity, ending with a passionate kiss with McKellen, who considered the scene a special bonus for the running of the festival and an extended season of the two plays at the Piccadilly Theater in London, encouraged by Harold Hobson who was the -thank you for the festival. Sunday Times. The kiss was not particularly mentioned in the theater (censorship was abolished in 1968), but it caused outrage across the country when the plays were televised in 1970: the first gay kiss on the box.
In the 1990s, after the break-up of her first marriage, Laurenson moved from London to Frome, in Somerset, and resumed a happy relationship with the RSC’s founding director, Sir Peter Hall, whose work he admired. in the Indian summer Hall of the seasons at the Theatre. Royal, Bath.
Amongst the generous selection of fine performances there, I would highlight Alan Dobie’s wryly stoical Vladimir’s quietly resigned Estragon in Waiting for Godot, one of the best revivals of that milestone play I have seen, directed by Hall, who was on the stage of the first British. produced in 1955; and Sir Peter Teazle’s delightful hangman in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s brilliant comedy The School for Scandal, directed by Jamie Lloyd in 2012.
The Beckett happily transferred to the Ambassadors in London, where Laurenson’s biggest and most exciting role in the West End was that of producer Julian Marsh in Gower Champion’s famous 1983 Broadway version of one of the backstage films. best stage, 42nd Street.
Staged at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, by Lucia Victor, a year later, Marsh/Laurenson’s two most famous lines were no match for the Broadway pizazz of the original (“Company – the biggest words in English!” is catnip on Broadway, less so here); and his imprecation on the suddenly raised understudy, Peggy Sawyer, “You’re going to go out young, but you have to come back star!”, He was playing with beseeching almost carefully folded rather than gargantuan Jerry Orbach, Order of Shakespeare.
However, although he had no background in musical theatre, and could not sing that well, Michael Billington praised Laurenson for conveying “the right impression of a sober-suited Caligula melting into the human”.
He was born in Marton, on the north island of New Zealand, to Amy (née Monk) and her husband, Stanley Laurenson, a seed seller in the agricultural neighborhood, and a Methodist lay preacher with a penchant for amateur drama. James appeared in school plays at Marton district high school before further developing his thespian inclinations at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, where crime novelist Ngaio Marsh directed him in several productions, including the title role of Macbeth; Marsh was, in fact, the inspiration and founder of professional theater in New Zealand.
The move to Britain was encouraged by receiving a grant from the New Zealand government to go to Lamda in London for a year. He started out at the RSC as a messenger in Henry VI (David Warner as the king) in 1964 and then Guildenstern – played by Michael Williams Rosencrantz – in Warner’s 1965 play Hamlet.
He played Longaville in John Barton’s exquisite 1965 RSC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Orlando as Rosalind Charlotte Cornwell in Trevor Nunn’s 1977 revival of As You Like It; the Dauphin and the rabble-rouser Jack Cade in the Alan Howard trilogy Henry VI (1978), directed by Terry Hands; and Cassius in memory – opposite Ben Kingsley’s Brutus – in Julius Caesar in 1979.
He appeared twice in Hamlet, though not as the prince: he was a brisk and disarming Claudius in Jonathan Kent’s Almeida production at the Hackney Empire, with Ralph Fiennes and Francesca Annis in 1995; and a wonderful, unusual double of the Ghost (mesmeric, quietly spoken) and the Player King (who enjoys oratorical variety) in Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 National Theater production with Rory Kinnear.
Other notable revivals include Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Haymarket in 1997, with Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, in which he and Annette Crosbie played, superbly, terror-stricken neighbors seeking refuge; and the 2000 Donmar Warehouse revival of Peter Nichols’ Passion Play, a stirring adultery comedy that linked two cross-dressing couples – Laurenson and Cherie Lunghi, and Martin Jarvis and Cheryl Campbell – with a disturbing catalyst played by Nicola Walker. Michael Grandage’s production confirmed the status of a modern classic of strong black comedy.
Related: Waiting for Godot, Theater Royal, Bath
Laurenson’s film career did not include any major stories, but he appeared regularly after his first appearance in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) as a minister. He had two reasonable roles, in The Attack of Sidney Hayers (1971), in which he was a doctor attending to rape victims who become the prime suspect; and as Bob Geldof’s Pink’s deceased father in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd – the Wall (1982), who revisits his unhappy childhood.
Other films included A House in the Hills (1993) with Michael Madsen, the French/British crime film Three Blind Mice (2003) with Edward Furlong and Emilia Fox, One Day (2011) with Lone Scherfig, scripted from his novel own by David Nicholls. , with Anne Hathaway and Patricia Clarkson, and Scherfig’s The Riot Club (2014), written by Laura Wade – based on her brilliant play Posh, an exposé of the Bullingdon private club in Oxford (dis)glued by David Cameron and Boris Johnson – with Sam Claflin and Max Irons as tearful undergraduates who are ultimately responsible for their college president, played by Laurenson, a sports authority.
It was interesting that Laurenson, a kind and patient man, was often excellent at playing baddies. One of them was the gliowering Friedrich, Elector of Brandenburg, in Heinrich von Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg, directed by Neil Bartlett for the RSC and Lyric Hammersmith in 2002. You wouldn’t want to cross him in spirit, or manner that. But he had the rare knack of playing ugly in the nicest way.
Laurenson married eccentric character actress Carol MacReady in 1970. They divorced in 1997, and then he married art teacher Cari Haysom, with whom he lives with his son from his first marriage, Jamie, a film producer, and three grandchildren, Nancy. , Connie and Stanley.
• James Philip Laurenson, actor, born 17 February 1940; he died 18 April 2024
