The Times obituary

Paul Scofield, the actor acclaimed by his peers as the greatest of all Shakespearean performers, has died at the age of 86.

His agent, Rosalind Chatto, confirmed this morning that he had passed away peacefully in a hospital near his home in Sussex yesterday. “He had leukaemia and had not been well for some time,” she said.

Scofield was an actors' actor. He abhorred publicity and was notoriously selective about the roles he accepted.

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Whatever unlikely role he was playing, always you knew you were watching and hearing a great actor

Benedict Nightingale

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The glamour of Hollywood, which helped to make international stars out of his contemporaries Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Sir Alec Guinness, never appealed.

To the wider public he was best known for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More, the principled Tudor statesman in A Man For All Seasons. It won him the Best Actor Oscar in 1967, although he did not turn up to collect it. More recently he gave a memorable Bafta nominated performance on television in Martin Chuzzlewit, playing the title role and his brother, Anthony.

However it was on the stage that he was at his most thrillingly powerful. “Of the ten greatest moments in the theatre, eight are Scofield’s,” Burton once said.

In 2004 a poll of 200 Royal Shakespeare Company actors —including Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Donald Sinden, Sir Antony Sher and Corin Redgrave — acclaimed his legendary King Lear of 1962 as the greatest performance in a Shakespeare play.

Olivier called Scofield’s whiskey-soaked priest in a stage adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory "the best performance I can remember seeing".

Scofield was appointed a CBE more than half a century ago, in 1956, after his appearance in Peter Brook’s Hamlet in Moscow.

He twice rejected a knighthood, citing his desire to remain “plain Mr”.

“If you want a title, what’s wrong with Mr?”, he once said. “If you have always been that, then why lose your title? But it’s not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully.”

Instead, in the 2001 New Year Honours list, Scofield became a Companion of Honour, which ranks with a knighthood and is held by only 65 people at a time.

Other than his Oscar-winning Sir Thomas, Scofield’s most celebrated performance was perhaps his portrayal of Salieri, the tormented composer, in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus.

His first love was the stage, but he starred in more than a dozen films despite being famously selective about the parts he took on. A notoriously private person — it was once said of him: “Only the dead play harder to get” — he avoided interviews wherever possible.

Nevertheless, he attracted fame for a host of performances, from Alexander the Great in Adventure Story, written for him by Terence Rattigan, to Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show, for which he was Oscar-nominated as Best Supporting Actor.

On the small screen, his CV included the BBC’s £4 million adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit in 1994.

David Paul Scofield was born on January 21, 1922 in Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, where his father was the village schoolmaster. He was educated at Varndean School for Boys in Brighton, where, wearing blond plaits, he played Juliet and Rosalind.

He joined Croydon Repertory Theatre at the age of 17 to train as a professional actor.

His first professional role was a walk-on part in Desire under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre in 1940, but his first big break came when he joined Basil C Langton’s touring company in Birmingham in 1942, playing Horatio in Hamlet. Joy Parker, his wife-to-be, played Ophelia. They married in 1943 and had two children.

Scofield’s presence was described as “monumental but reassuring” and his voice compared variously to a Rolls-Royce being started up and a sound rumbling up from an ancientcrypt.

In his private life he avoided both the limelight and the party circuit, preferring to walk, ride and cycle around the area where he lived in Balcombe, West Sussex. He also savoured the wind and rain in his holiday home on a Scottish island. As the headlines once put it, he was “a very private actor”.

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