Nigel Hawthorne

Hawthorne was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, the second of four children of Agnes Rosemary (née Rice) and Charles Barnard Hawthorne, a physician.[1]

When Nigel was three years old, the family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where his father had bought a practice. Initially they lived in the Gardens and then moved to a newly built house near Camps Bay.[2]

He attended St George's Grammar School, Cape Town, and, although the family was not Catholic, at a now-defunct Christian Brothers College,[3] where he played on the rugby team.[4] He described his time at the latter as not being a particularly happy experience.[2]

He enrolled at the University of Cape Town, where he met and sometimes acted in plays with Theo Aronson (later a well-known biographer), but withdrew and returned to the United Kingdom in the 1950s to pursue a career in acting.

Hawthorne made his professional stage debut in 1950, playing Archie Fellows in a Cape Town production of The Shop at Sly Corner.[3] Unhappy in South Africa, he decided to move to London, where he performed in various small parts before becoming recognised as a great character actor.

Finding success in London, Hawthorne decided to try his luck in New York City and eventually got a part in a 1974 production of As You Like It on Broadway. Around this time, he was persuaded by Ian McKellen and Judi Dench to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also supplemented his income by appearing in television advertisements, including one for Mackeson Stout, and in the early 1990s starred alongside Tom Conti in a long running series of commercials for Vauxhall.

He returned to the New York stage in 1990 in Shadowlands and won the 1991 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.[5]

Although Hawthorne had appeared in small roles in various British television series since the late 1950s, his most famous role was as Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Permanent Secretary of the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs in the television series Yes Minister (and Cabinet Secretary in its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister), for which he won four BAFTA awards during the 1980s. He became a household name throughout the United Kingdom, which finally opened the doors to film roles. In 1982, Hawthorne appeared in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, alongside a distinguished international cast including Martin Sheen, John Mills, Candice Bergen, John Gielgud, Ian Charleson and Ben Kingsley. That same year, he starred opposite Clint Eastwood in the cold war thriller Firefox, where he played a dissident Russian scientist.

Other film roles during this time included Demolition Man, which he detested for being "brainless" and a "cheap picture". However, it led to his most famous role: that of King George III in Alan Bennett's stage play The Madness of George III (for which he won a Best Actor Olivier Award) and then the film adaptation entitled The Madness of King George, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and won the BAFTA Film Award for Best Actor.

After this success, his friend Ian McKellen asked him to play his doomed brother Clarence in Richard III, and Steven Spielberg asked him to play lame duck president Martin Van Buren in Amistad. He won a sixth BAFTA for the 1996 TV mini-series The Fragile Heart. He also drew praise for his role of Georgie Pillson in the London Weekend Television series "Mapp and Lucia."

Hawthorne was also a voice actor, and lent his voice to two Disney films: Fflewddur Fflam in The Black Cauldron (1985) and Professor Porter in Tarzan (1999). He also voiced Captain Campion in the animated film adaptation of Watership Down (1978).

An intensely private person, he was annoyed at having been outed as gay in 1995 in the publicity surrounding the Academy Awards, but he did attend the ceremony with his long-time partner Trevor Bentham, and afterward, he spoke openly about being gay in interviews and in his autobiography, Straight Face,[6] which was published posthumously.[7]

They met in 1968 when Bentham was stage-managing the Royal Court Theatre. From 1979 until Hawthorne's death in 2001, they lived together in Radwell and then at Thundridge, both in Hertfordshire. The two of them became fund raisers for the North Hertfordshire hospice and other local charities.[8]

Hawthorne died from a heart attack at his home on 26 December 2001, aged 72.[8] He had recently undergone several operations for pancreatic cancer, which he was diagnosed with in mid-2000, but had been discharged from hospital for the Christmas holidays.[8] He was survived by Bentham, and his funeral service was held at St Mary's, the Parish Church of Thundridge near Ware, Hertfordshire, following which he was cremated at Stevenage Crematorium.[9] His funeral was attended by Derek Fowlds, Maureen Lipman, Charles Dance, Loretta Swit and Frederick Forsyth along with friends and local people. The service was led by the Right Reverend Christopher Herbert, the Bishop of St Albans. The coffin had a wreath of white lilies and orchids and Bentham was one of the pallbearers.[10]

On hearing of Hawthorne's death, Alan Bennett described him in his diary: "Courteous, grand, a man of the world and superb at what he did, with his technique never so obvious as to become familiar as, say, Olivier's did or Alec Guinness's."[11]

He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1987 New Years Honours List,[12] and was knighted in the 1999 New Years Honours List "for services to the Theatre, Film and Television."[13][14]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nigel Hawthorne.

• Nigel Hawthorne at IMDb
• Nigel Hawthorne at the Internet Broadway Database