Sir Antony Sher, actor hailed as one of the greatest stage performers of his time – obituary

Sir Antony Sher, the actor, writer and director, who has died from cancer aged 72, made a speciality of playing damaged, neurotic, but strangely charismatic characters.

Sher “worked in the arts” in the broadest sense. As well as acting, he wrote several well-received novels, books of memoirs and a few plays. He was also an accomplished painter; as a child in South Africa, he was hailed as an artistic prodigy. His gifts in all these fields were those of a skilled caricaturist.

Sher burst into the public consciousness in 1981 in the leading role in the BBC television adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical novel The History Man. The story, set in 1972, evoked an era when campus demonstrations and sit-ins seemed constantly to grab the media headlines – and as the monstrous Howard Kirk, the libidinous, Zapata-moustachioed lecturer and campus revolutionary for whom teaching is a means to manipulate young minds and bodies, Sher gave a performance that established him as a household name.

He went on to take other parts on television and appeared in a few films, winning an Evening Standard Award for his pricelessly funny performance as Disraeli in Mrs Brown (1996). But it was for his stage performances, mostly for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, that he became best known.

Over the years, Sher tackled many of the meatiest roles in the canon, winning an Olivier Award in his second season with the RSC, in 1984, for his venomous, spider-like Richard III, scuttling about the stage on crutches – a role that also helped launch his literary career, with the publication of Year of the King: An Actor’s Diary and Sketchbook in 1985.

The previous season he had taken the title role in Tartuffe and had given a vaudevillian performance as the Fool to Michael Gambon’s Lear in Adrian Noble’s production, winning a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

After that he took leading roles in numerous RSC productions – including the title roles in Tamburlaine the Great (1992), Cyrano de Bergerac (1997), Stanley (based on the life of Stanley Spencer, for which he won a second Olivier Award in 1997), and Macbeth (1999), directed by his partner Greg Doran, a role in which he took audiences into the tortured soul of a murderer and established a terrifying intimacy with his Lady Macbeth (Harriet Walter). To research the role he interviewed two convicted murderers.

Other work included Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1987), a luxuriously bearded Falstaff in Henry IV pts I and II (2014) and the tortured protagonists in Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass (2011) and Death of a Salesman (2015). In 2016 he played the title role in King Lear, becoming very probably the only person to play both the Fool and Lear at the RSC.

Of his performance in the title role of Kean (2007) one critic observed that as the brilliant but dissolute actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown, “Sher establishes himself as one of the greatest stage actors of his time in a performance that effortlessly encompasses low farce and high tragedy.”

In 2011, writing in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Tim Walker observed that theatreland had become “packed with the ghosts of [Sher’s] definitive performances”. Yet the actor himself always felt that he was an outsider, and he remained endearingly unchanged by adulation and the passage of time.

He would recall how, when he was presented to the Queen at the Prince of Wales’s 50th birthday party at Buckingham Palace, Sir Geoffrey Cass – then the chairman of the RSC – told the Queen in a stage whisper: “He is one of our leading actors, ma’am.”

Her Majesty frowned, paused for some time and finally said: “Oh, are you?” Luckily she quickly moved on, for (according to Sher) he had been just about to utter the words: “No, of course not, Your Majesty. You’ve seen through me. I’m just a little gay Yid from somewhere called Sea Point on the other side of the world. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know why I am. I am an impostor.”

Nobody, observed Tim Walker, “does neurosis, insecurity and downright paranoia on- and offstage quite like Sher”.

Antony Sher was born on June 14 1949 into a Lithuanian-Jewish family in Cape Town, South Africa, and grew up in the suburb of Sea Point; his parents were Emmanuel and Margery Sher.

Although “Little Ant”, as his family called him, excelled in art and drama lessons at school, he had an early awareness of being different from his classmates. “I felt I’d been born on the moon,” he recalled in his autobiography Beside Myself (2002), “not just in the wrong country, but on the wrong planet. I just didn’t seem to fit in to that very macho, rugby-playing, extrovert, outdoor-living South African society.”

But as he also admitted, as a child he was ignorant of the politics of apartheid. “I was brought up in a very apolitical family. We were happy to enjoy the benefits of apartheid without questioning the system behind it. Reading about apartheid when I came to England was a terrible shock. So I lost the accent almost immediately, and if anyone asked me where I was from I would lie.”

After an unhappy spell in the South African Defence Force, Sher moved to Britain in 1968, intent upon becoming an actor. Rejected by Rada and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he won a place at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art.

After training, and some early performances with the theatre group Gay Sweatshop, he landed his first job at the Liverpool Everyman, becoming part of a group of young actors and writers comprising such figures as Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, Trevor Eve, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Pryce and Julie Walters.

Then came the lead in the television adaptation of The History Man, and in 1982 he joined the RSC.

Sher had a handful of film credits, but the roles were mostly small. “After Mrs Brown, it felt like, ‘Ah, things are going to happen’ – and they didn’t,” he recalled. A friend came up with one possible explanation: “He said, ‘Well, you’ve got to understand there are not that many parts for Jewish prime ministers.’ That is how Hollywood thinks.” After The History Man, Sher’s television appearances, too, were few and far between.

His other stage roles included Primo Levi in Sher’s own adaptation of Levi’s If This Is a Man (2004), the drag queen Arnold in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1985), Iago in Othello (2004), Prospero in The Tempest (2008), Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1987), a world-weary Sigmund Freud in Hysteria (2013), and Dr Thomas Stockmann, the headstrong hero of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2010).

His final role, in John Kani’s Kunene and the King, at Stratford (2019), won praise from critics. Sher played Jack, a terminally ill actor who goes to South Africa to play Lear and is looked after by Kunene, a black carer with whom a love-hate relationship develops; for The Spectator’s Lloyd Evans it was “the best sort of role for Sher”, who found “magical elements of warmth and lightness in the spiteful, curmudgeonly Jack”.

Sher had taken his first crack at the lead in a West End premiere in 2001, when he was given the role of the composer Gustav Mahler in his cousin Ronald Harwood’s play Mahler’s Conversion, about Mahler’s decision to renounce his Jewish faith prior to his appointment as conductor and artistic director of the Vienna State Opera House in 1897. This was one of his few failures, however. Terrible notices closed it within a month.

Among Sher’s other books were Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa (with Gregory Doran, 1997), Primo Time (2005), and Year of the Fat Knight (2015); a book of paintings and drawings, Characters (1990), and the novels Middlepost (1989), Cheap Lives (1995), The Indoor Boy (1996) and The Feast (1999). He also wrote several plays, including ID (2003) and Primo (2004), which was adapted as a film in 2005.

By his own admission, until the mid-1990s, when he booked himself into a clinic, Sher was doing a lot of cocaine, and although he succeeded in kicking the habit he never entirely lost the paranoia that prolonged use of the drug induces.

“You’re talking to someone who suffers every kind of Jewish paranoia imaginable,” he told Helena de Bertodano of The Daily Telegraph in 2000. “Believe me, when I go to Woody Allen films, I really identify very strongly. I wouldn’t call mine a happy life. It’s a fairly bizarre life, but then maybe all of our lives are fairly weird.”

Antony Sher was knighted in 2000. In 2005, he and his partner, Gregory Doran, became one of the first gay couples to enter into a civil partnership in Britain, and in 2015 they were married.

In September 2021 Doran, artistic director of the RSC, announced that he was taking compassionate leave to care for Sher. Doran survives him.

Antony Sher, born June 14 1949, died December 2 2021