Anthony Quayle

Anthony Quayle: The Officer Who Rebuilt Stratford

In July 1943, an artillery officer attached to the Governor of Gibraltar watched an aircraft carrying General Władysław Sikorski, commander-in-chief of the Polish forces, drop into the sea seconds after take-off. Anthony Quayle later turned what he saw into a novel, *On Such a Night*. Five years afterwards the same man was running the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, and the war he rarely discussed had given him something no drama school could: the authority of a person who had actually commanded men. Audiences read it in every officer he ever played.

Rugby, RADA, and the Q Theatre

John Anthony Quayle was born on 7 September 1913 in Ainsdale, Southport, Lancashire, son of the solicitor Arthur Quayle, of Manx descent, and Esther Kate Quayle, née Overton. He went to Abberley Hall and then Rugby School, and lasted one year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before the profession swallowed him. He was still a student when he made his professional debut at the Q Theatre in London in 1931 — one account has him as Richard the Lionheart in *Robin Hood*, another in *The Ghost Train* — and after a spell in music hall he joined the Old Vic in 1932. It was the ideal apprenticeship: a company that expected an actor to play everything and to play it fast.

His Broadway debut came in *The Country Wife* in 1936. In 1937 he was Laertes in the *Hamlet* staged at Elsinore, and in 1939 he took the title role in *Henry V* on tour through Europe and Egypt — the last summer before the theatres of Europe closed. He married the actress Hermione Hannen in 1935; they divorced in 1941, and in 1947 he married the American actress Dorothy Hyson, with whom he had two daughters, Jenny and Rosanna, and a son, Christopher.

Behind Enemy Lines

Quayle enlisted in the Royal Artillery as a gunner, trained with the 70th Coast Defence Training Regiment, and was commissioned second lieutenant on 7 January 1940. He commanded an Auxiliary Units area in Northumberland — the stay-behind cells intended to fight on after a German invasion. Then he joined the Special Operations Executive and served as liaison officer with the Albanian partisans, work he never afterwards felt comfortable discussing and instead fictionalised in *Eight Hours from England* (1945). In Gibraltar he staged small productions for the troops, his first work as a director. He was demobilised a temporary major, and in May 1946 was mentioned in despatches for "gallant and distinguished services in the Mediterranean Theatre."

The Stratford Years

The appointment that made him consequential came in 1948, when he took over the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. He held it until 1956, appearing in more than twenty roles and directing nine productions himself, and he used the theatre's commercial pull to draw in the biggest names in British acting — most famously Laurence Olivier, who played opposite Quayle's Aaron in *Titus Andronicus*. His own Stratford parts covered the range that a company leader is expected to cover: Falstaff, Othello, Benedick in *Much Ado About Nothing*, Henry VIII.

The point was not simply that the seasons were good. Quayle turned a provincial festival theatre into a permanent, ambitious, nationally serious institution, and in doing so laid the foundations for the Royal Shakespeare Company that Peter Hall would formally create after him. When Quayle died, Sir John Mills went straight to it: "His greatest achievement was the founding of the Royal Shakespeare Company."

Two Careers at Once

Having built the house, he spent the rest of his life working in everyone else's. On stage he was Moses in Christopher Fry's *The Firstborn* opposite Katharine Cornell, Mosca in Jonson's *Volpone*, and in 1958 James Tyrone in the first British production of O'Neill's *Long Day's Journey Into Night* at the Globe. Thirty-four years after his Broadway debut he returned there as Andrew Wyke in Anthony Shaffer's *Sleuth* (1970) and took a Drama Desk Award for it.

On screen he was one of the most reliable presences in British cinema. After an uncredited Italian wigmaker in *Pygmalion* (1938) and Marcellus in Olivier's *Hamlet* (1948), he worked for Hitchcock in *The Wrong Man* and for Powell and Pressburger in *The Battle of the River Plate*, both 1956. Then came the run that fixed his public face: *Ice Cold in Alex* (1958), which earned him a BAFTA nomination and in which he played sharply against type as a German spy; *The Guns of Navarone* (1961); David Lean's *Lawrence of Arabia* (1962), alongside his old Old Vic friends Jack Hawkins and Jack Gwillim; *The Fall of the Roman Empire* (1964); *Operation Crossbow* (1965); *The Eagle Has Landed* (1976). His single most admired film performance was Cardinal Wolsey in *Anne of the Thousand Days* (1969), which brought Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

Television paid similarly well: the title role in *Strange Report* (1969), narration for *The Six Wives of Henry VIII* (1970), Rubrius Gallus in *Masada* (1981), General Villiers in *The Bourne Identity* (1988), and a Primetime Emmy in 1975 for *QB VII*.

In the mid-1970s he was artist-in-residence and then professor of theatre at the University of Tennessee's Clarence Brown Theatre, having arrived in 1974 through a Kennedy Center partnership. And in 1984, aged seventy-one, he founded the Compass Theatre Company to tour serious work to provincial audiences, opening with *The Clandestine Marriage* at the Albery and going on the road with *Saint Joan*, *Dandy Dick* and *King Lear*, playing Lear himself.

Why Anthony Is Called a Genius

The claim has to be made carefully, because Quayle was not the outstanding actor of his generation and nobody who watched Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson ever pretended otherwise. He was a superb professional rather than a transformative one — a character actor of great solidity, most often cast as the decent British officer because he had been one, and honest enough about the range that his best-remembered screen work is a supporting cardinal and a German spy rather than a leading man.

Where the extraordinary quality sits is in something rarer than performance: institutional imagination. In 1948 Stratford was a seasonal festival with a good building and no permanent artistic weight. Quayle worked out that if he could persuade the finest actors in Britain to spend their summers in Warwickshire, the reputation would follow the talent and the money would follow the reputation — and then he spent eight years doing it, running a company, directing nine productions and playing twenty-odd parts at the same time. That is a specific and unusual cognitive gift: the ability to see an institution that does not yet exist and then build it out of other people's careers. John Mills, a peer with no reason to flatter, called the founding of the RSC Quayle's greatest achievement, and the judgment has held.

The honest counter-case is that his fame rests on borrowed light — the RSC's, and that of the epics he appeared in — and that as an actor he was excellent within a narrow band. He would probably have agreed. Asked to look back, he said only: "I don't regret anything in my life, and I wouldn't change a moment of it."

Legacy

He was appointed CBE in the 1952 Birthday Honours, for military service, and knighted in the 1985 New Year Honours for services to the theatre, receiving the accolade from Queen Elizabeth II on 5 March 1985. He wrote two novels out of the war and an autobiography, *A Time to Speak*, published after his death. He withdrew from a touring production in August 1989 and died of liver cancer at his Chelsea home on 20 October, aged seventy-six, his wife Dorothy at his bedside. The company he assembled at Stratford outlived him by decades and is still, most nights of the year, performing.

Achievements

• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Knight Bachelor
• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie — 1975
• Worked as stage actor, film actor and writer