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pressed. I just couldn’t do it at all.” They
persevered and he emerged a marginal-
ly happier man. Later he turned the
tables on the profession, playing Sig-
mund Freud in Terry Johnson’s Hyste-
ria at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2012,
a work based on a real-life encounter
between Freud and the young Salvador
Dalí in 1938.
Sher was a member of the theatre
group Gay Sweatshop before joining
the RSC in 1982. For 17 years he was in
a relationship with the actor Jim Hoop-
er, though Hooper overlapped with
Greg Doran, who Sher met in 1987
while working on The Merchant of Ven-
ice for the RSC. “I was playing Shylock
and I noticed this handsome chap who
was playing Solanio, so I asked the
director who he was,” he told The
Independent.
Doran soon gave up acting for direct-
ing, though the first time they worked
together as director and actor, on Titus
Andronicus in South Africa in 1995, was
a disaster. “We’d come home from re-
hearsals in the evening and carry on
discussing our work, and if we dis-
agreed it would get horribly tense,”
Sher said. “It once got so heated he
threw a plate and then a glass at me, and
after that we made a rule that we were
not allowed to bring work home.” By
the time they were working on Cyrano
de Bergerac in 1997 they had established
a rule of not talking about work outside
rehearsal, “which is also fairer to the
rest of the company”, Sher added.
In 2005 they were one of the first gay
couples to enter a civil partnership,
spending their honeymoon in Uganda,
“a famously homophobic regime, to go
and see mountain gorillas”. When gayPrince Charles was in India on the last
day of his 2017 Commonwealth tour
when a group of children asked him to
name his favourite actor. “Sir Antony
Sher, who is a brilliant Shakespearean
actor,” he responded unhesitatingly.
While to many people Sher was in-
deed the John Gielgud or Laurence
Olivier of his generation, it would be
hard to picture either of those thea-
trical knights as a drag queen wearing
false eyelashes, 4in heels and a lustrous
red wig, as Sher did in Harvey Fier-
stein’s Torch Song Trilogy at the Albery
Theatre in 1985, or even to imagine the
heir to the throne in the audience.
Sher had made his name at Stratford
the previous year in the title role of
Richard III, scuttling about like a spider
on a pair of highly sprung crutches in a
performance that, according to The
Times, “relegates even his most daz-
zling past performances to the status of
a warm-up”. Sheridan Morley de-
scribed it as “the only one in our life-
time to have challenged the 40-year
memory of Olivier in that role”, and
Sher was duly recognised with Olivier
and Evening Standard theatre awards.
This success was all the more re-
markable given that two years earlier
he had ruptured his achilles tendon
playing the Fool to Michael Gambon’s
Lear at Stratford. “That accident gave
me a terrible fright, a fear of falling, and
I don’t think the crutches in Richard
would have occurred to me if I hadn’t
been going through all that physiother-
apy at the time,” he said. By the end of
the century his roles had included Shy-
lock in Merchant of Venice (1987), and
the title roles in Titus Andronicus (1994)
and Macbeth (1999).
Yet Sher was not all Shakespeare and
drag queens. Even while playing Rich-
ard twice a week he was appearing as
Father Flote, the perky priest who
brings some cheer during the 14th-cen-
tury plague in Peter Barnes’s Red Noses.
At other times he was Philip Gellburg,
the self-hating Jew in Arthur Miller’s
Broken Glass, a role with which he
found some personal resonance, while
his performance as Willy Loman in
Miller’s Death of a Salesman received a
five-star review from The Times that
concluded: “He is in total control of a
man losing control.”
Attractive, responsive and funny,
Sher was an inquisitive soul, always cu-
rious to know more, never willing to let
matters rest. He was immensely polite
and gentle while at the same time being
highly driven. His heroes were the Mar-
lon Brando of The Godfather and the
Meryl Streep of The Iron Lady, versatile
actors whose own hearts and souls
subtly shine through. “That seems to
me [the] ultimate acting,” he said. “It’s
what I aim for.”
While best known for his stage roles,
he did make occasional forays on to tel-
evision, including as Howard Kirk, the
odious sex-mad lecturer in The History
Man( 1981 ),for which he was rewarded
with a slew of upsetting public abuse,
but grew bored playing a prosecutor op-
posite Derek Jacobi’s defence lawyer in
ITV’s six-hour courtroom drama The
Jury. The highlights of his rare outings
on the big screen were as a pricelessly
observing that she was probably aware
of South Africa’s Immorality Act for-
bidding interracial sex.
As a boy he could often be found
drawing, later describing his pens and
crayons as an escape from the “easygo-
ing, outdoor swagger” of white South
Africa. His artistic skills achieved such
renown that one newspaper headline
declared “Cape boy of 14 is wonder art-
ist” and he briefly contemplated going
to art school in Italy. He never forsook
those childhood pens and crayons, and
in adult life could often be found
sketching during rehearsals. He re-
mained prone to sporadic bursts of
painting, keeping his local Islington art
shop busy with his demands for brush-
es, paints and other materials.
At Sea Point Boys’ High School he
discovered that sporting prowess was
prized above learning. “There was a
Shakespeare play on the syllabus each
year, but it was taught in that dry, dull
way which has put kids off Shakespeare
across the English-speaking world,” he
said. “Our teachers had no idea that the
works were written to be performed,
not read.” At his mother’s insistence he
took elocution lessons with Esther Ca-
plan, who introduced him to the plays
of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and
Arnold Wesker.
He was 16 when he saw a perform-
ance of Athol Fugard’s autobiographi-
cal play Hello and Goodbye, with Fugard
himself as Johnnie, but being a well
brought up, middle-class boy he
“blushed to hear stage characters talk-
ing in these ugly, streetwise accents”. At
the same time he was overwhelmed by
the amount of energy and poetry it con-
tained and in 1988 appeared in a new
staging of the work at the Almeida
Theatre, London.
Sher’s artistic skills resurfaced during
compulsory military service with the
South African Defence Force in the
Namib desert. Desperate to escape the
worst extremes of the physical exercise
regimen, he pleaded flat feet and spent
his time painting the officers’ portraits,
“a whole series of them... who are now
murdering people all over Southfunny Benjamin Disraeli inMrs Brown
( 1997 ) with Judi Dench, Billy Connolly
and Geoffrey Palmer, and as the quack
psychiatrist Dr Moth in the Oscar-
winningShakespeare in Love( 1998 )
with Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes
and Geoffrey Rush.
Yet Sher’s insecurities were never far
beneath the surface. “Gay, Jewish,
white South African, that’s three
minority groups,” he mused. “I wasn’t
ready to come out as gay. Jewish I was a
bit worried about because I couldn’t see
any examples of great leading classical
actors who were Jewish, and white
South African was a problem because
my political education didn’t really
start until I got here [Britain] and I
suddenly realised I’d been part of one of
the most abhorrent societies on Earth.”
Antony Sher was born into a Lithua-
nian-Jewish family in Cape Town in
1949, the son of Emmanuel Sher, a
heavy-drinking importer of animalhides who slept through many of his
son’s theatrical triumphs, and his wife,
Margery, who meticulously collected
all his reviews; he had three siblings,
Randall, Verne and Joel, and a mongrel
dog named Tickey. He was a cousin of
the playwright Ronald Harwood (obit-
uary, September 9, 2020) and in 2001
starred in Harwood’s Mahler’s Conver-
sion at the Aldwych Theatre about the
composer’s rejection of his Jewish
background and its devastating
consequences. As a child he was known
as Ant, but once in London he became
Tony.
He grew up knowing “very little
about the apartheid laws at all” but told
of “getting our coloured garden boy,
William, to give me foot and bum mas-
sages” until William said it was not
right. On another occasion he ventured
into the maid’s room in a visible state of
arousal only to be turned away, later‘Gay, Jewish, white South
African,’ he said, ‘that’s
three minority groups’
Antony Sher in The
Merchant of Venice
(1988) and as Richard
III (1985), the role that
made his name. He
got the idea for the
crutches from
rupturing his achilles
tendon in King Lear
two years earlierHe was also a prolific painter and writer, and published hilarious theatre diariesObituaries
Africa”, he later observed drily. He
came to London in 1968 with his
parents, whose aim was to help him to
get into drama school. On his first
night he visited the Royal Court
Theatre, which he had been reading
about in Plays and Players, a theatrical
magazine that arrived in South Africa
every month. The Cardinal Wolsey
speech from Henry VIII that he deliv-
ered for his Rada audition went down
badly, with the subsequent damning
rejection letter concluding: “We
strongly recommend that you think
of another career.” The effect was
devastating. “You have this instinct,
this feeling you can be an actor,” he
told the Daily Mail. “When an author-
ity like Rada says you are useless it
takes a lot of strength to say, ‘They
are wrong, I am right’.”
In the meantime he had been des-
perately trying to create a new ident-
ity. “I didn’t come from Cape Town, I
came from Hampstead,” he said. “I
invented a whole history for myself,
but it all collapsed when people asked,
what school did you go to?” He also
shed all trace of his accent, saying: “I
was afraid of people attacking me
before they’d heard whether or not I
approved of the regime there.”
His parents returned to South Africa
and he moved into a bedsit in West
Kensington, which proved to be a mis-
erable experience. Eventually he was
accepted by the Webber Douglas stage
school “and I was happy there”. Yet his
student visa had been issued on the un-
derstanding that once he had finished
at drama school he would return to
South Africa. “Politically I knew that
was going to be impossible,” he told The
Times. “But for five years here I had to
inform the police of every change of ad-
dress as I travelled from seaside rep in
Frinton to the Manchester Stables and
eventually Liverpool.”
Consequently the early years of his
working life were spent in a state of
professional and personal insecurity.
Things began to turn a corner in 1975
when Willy Russell’s Beatles musical
John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert, in
which he played Ringo Starr, success-
fully transferred to the West End from
the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool,
where he had been working with Rus-
sell and Alan Bleasdale.
For many years Sher sought to keep
his personal life a mystery. He had long
tried to be what he called “normal” and
in 1972 was briefly married to Georgina
Ball, a choreographer. His decision to
reveal his true sexuality solidified dur-
ing Torch Song Trilogy, for which he
perfected his part by touring the drag
pubs of south London. “I was going to
publish a book of my paintings and
drawings and I knew that I wanted to
include portraits of the guy that I live
with and other aspects of gay life,” he
said. “I just thought, ‘This is the ideal
time to tell the truth at last’, and I feel so
much better now.”
In the early 1980s he sought help
from Monty Berman, shrink to the
stars, who in their first session asked
him to talk for one minute about all the
things he liked about himself. “I just sat
silently,” Sher said. “I felt very de-Sir Antony Sher
Groundbreaking Shakespearean actor considered the Olivier of his generation who launched his stage
career with a dazzling interpretation of Richard III on crutches, as well as a drag queen in 4in heels
ANDREW HASSON