Paul Scofield

Paul Scofield, widely regarded as one of England’s finest classical actors, has died aged 86. In 2002, He was invited by John Tydeman (for many years Head of Spoken Word, BBC Radio) to mark his eightieth birthday by recording his most famous Shakespearean role, King Lear, for Naxos AudioBooks. It proved to be a tour de force, with an exceptional cast clearing their diaries to work with him.

Nicolas Soames wrote the eightieth birthday article for the Sunday Times based on the recording. We reproduce it here.

Recording Lear

Paul Scofield has always been a man of an immense yet quiet charisma, an actor’s actor, so the opportunity to join him in a sound recording of King Lear, exactly forty years on from the legendary Peter Brook production, was not one that any actor wanted to miss.

The read-through, in the Hampstead studio, was more like family and friends than a formal company. Alec McCowen sat to Scofield’s right, his script on his knee. He was kind Gloucester with a painful fate ahead of him – though forty years ago, he played Fool to Scofield’s Lear. Both smiled at the passing of time.

The Fool this time was being played by Kenneth Branagh, who sat to Scofield’s left. They knew each other well – Scofield having played the King of France in Branagh’s film of Henry V. Also in the semi-circle were Harriet Walter (Goneril), Sara Kestelman (Regan) and Emilia Fox (Cordelia); and David Burke, Kent once more (two years after having played it at the National to Ian Holm’s Lear). In the director’s chair was John Tydeman, for thirty years the driving force in BBC Radio Drama, where he worked with Scofield in many radio productions, ranging from Macbeth to Captain Vere in Billy Budd. It was Tydeman’s suggestion that Scofield record Lear again.

And certainly, it was rather a special occasion – the eightieth birthday recording of the senior British classical actor in the Shakespearean role which he has made his own more than any other in living memory. There was Charles Laughton, Donald Wolfit, Laurence Olivier, before him, and Donald Sinden, John Wood, Michael Gambon, Robert Stephens and Ian Holm after him. Yet few are remembered so vividly as Scofield’s, though he was nearing forty when he first performed Lear.

The initial problem this time was cracking the sense of reverence. It was Scofield. He was nearing eighty. The wise old man, Sir Thomas More-Scofield. Of course, Lear was flawed humanity, but Scofield?

If Scofield was aware of the surrounding warmth and admiration – not quite the environment Lear finds himself in – he didn’t show it.

‘Attend the lords of France and Burgundy and Gloucester,’ said Scofield, in a relaxed entry, demonstrating a king who knows command, but who is looking forward, even mischievously, to relinquishing it. The voice, the mountain voice as it has been called, is as distinctive now as it was forty years ago.

In the studio, at that read-through as the play unfolded, the pages rustled and turned. Still, that atmosphere of near veneration for Scofield prevailed. Suddenly, without warning, there was an explosion. Unbalanced by events, King Lear is stunned by words of casual disrespect from Goneril and Regan and it is Lear, not Scofield who thunders ‘O reason not the need!’ and the room shakes. A few faces visibly pale from the sheer physical shock of the sound. In a moment, the room is charged with the opposing will of combatants – and the tragedy is set.

It is a very characteristic gesture from Scofield, a man seemingly endlessly patient and courteous; a man who arrives at the studios the following day for the start of the recording with his thermos flask of coffee and his marmite sandwiches; and a man who, famously, goes straight back, each night after play, film or recording, to his treasured village home in Sussex, a few miles away from where he was born the son of a headmaster; but a man who emits more danger with a glance and a shout than many a Welsh knight in a barbed leather facemask.

Scofield was a star by the time he was thirty. It came naturally and, in many ways, in spite of himself. His first major role was Juliet, at school, aged thirteen.

Apprenticed to rep in the customary manner, he travelled the length and breadth of Britain. From autumn 1944 to summer 1945, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company he played ten parts, from the clown in The Winter’s Tale to Jerry Devine in Juno and the Paycock. The following season he was still there – but with a difference. The records show Shaw (John Tanner in Man and Superman) Shakespeare (The Bastard in King John) and Ibsen (Dr Wangel in The Lady from the Sea) and the director Peter Brook.

Scofield was twenty-two and Brook just twenty when they first met in Birmingham. Brook told Scofield’s biographer, Garry O’Connor, ‘As we shook hands, I looked into a face that unaccountably in a young man was streaked and mottled like an old rock, and I was instantly aware that something very deep lay behind his ageless appearance,’ It took very little time for Scofield, accustomed to much older directors, to realise that though Brook was younger, he knew exactly what he was doing. ‘There was authority, there was insight, there was inventiveness,’ Scofield told O’Connor.

An association was formed – almost as key a relationship as Scofield’s marriage to the actress Joy Parker when they were both at Birmingham (By twenty-two Scofield was already a father and the marriage has endured – a rare thespian loyalty).

In 1946, Scofield joined the Festival Company, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford. He worked with Brook in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but also played Henry V, Mercutio, Pericles and Malcolm in Macbeth. Two years later, he played Hamlet – in early Victorian setting with black frock coat and narrow, strapped trousers. ‘When I was young, I wasn’t nervous at all. Even doing Hamlet, I just had a go,’ Scofield recalled. He had a second ‘go’ at Hamlet seven years later in a more famous production in Birmingham, London and then the Moscow Arts Theatre. Standing over six foot, with high cheekbones and presence, he was a hit.

Admired for his Hamlet’s ‘agony of irresolution’ Scofield himself was anything but. With immediate decisiveness, he declined a seven-year contract with Hollywood outright. ‘On stage,’ Scofield has said ‘the emotions are real but they are not mine,’ Off stage, the emotions and the decisions have always been very definitely his. And they remain so.

The speech studio where King Lear is being recorded is, like many, less than glamorous. It is, frankly, run down with threadbare carpet, old acoustic padding.

Technically, however, it is sound and it needs to be: in the tradition of audiobook or radio drama, the pace is fast – there are just three days to put Lear down on tape (or in digits, these days). From the opening scene (it is being done in sequence) the recording going well. The cast are all radio veterans and by one o’clock, Lear has rejected Cordelia, gone to Goneril and there is time for lunch. Fortunately, the sun is out and rather than pack in the green room, the cast loll out in the garden.

Branagh, clearly enjoying being without directorial responsibilities, is ahead on anecdotes, though David Burke is not far behind. A coffee pot explodes over Alec McCowen’s trousers – a genuine accident, not a gag. Sarah Kestelman slips her latest cabaret CD to a friend.

Scofield is nowhere to be seen, on this occasion. He has wandered off with his portable lunch to sit on a bench in a nearby park by himself. It has all seemed quite effortless but you never really know what goes on inside. He is an actor. On his return he explains: ‘Once having played this role, it never leaves you. It becomes a part of you which grows and develops alongside one’s own passage of years,’

He adds: ‘Of course, I restudied the play, but it was all there – it needed no resuscitation,’ He breaks into a beam: ‘And after forty years, you don’t have to act so much!

At the end of the first day, he swiftly gathers his script and bag, and slips into the car down to Victoria Station and home.

‘Paul was a sphinx,’ said John Gielgud once.

Lear is a younger man’s role, and not just because he has to carry the dead Cordelia. ‘Four score and upwards’ says Shakespeare, but it is a tough call in reality. The Brook production of Lear was timed to perfection because as a complete actor, Scofield was at his peak.

He had just finished a hugely successful run of Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, in England and on Broadway. At the time there was a clandestine and then an open rivalry between Peter Hall at Stratford and Laurence Olivier at Chichester as well as his fledgling National Theatre. Scofield was one of the prizes – Hall offering Lear and Brook, won. Among the cast with Scofield were Diana Rigg as Cordelia, Irene Worth as Goneril who was there again in North London for this recording). The Brook production was a triumph. It was toured, recorded and filmed.

Then and now, Scofield tried to evade controversy but the alleged rivalry with Olivier (one-sided) has refused to go away. Scofield famously gets one mention – just one – in Laurence Olivier’s autobiography. Scofield’s defenders say that he was Othello to Olivier’s Iago. More obviously and more accurately, perhaps, he was Sir Thomas More to Olivier’s Henry VIII. In 1965, when the film came to be made, he was certainly More. Relatively few classical actors are so closely allied to one star film role the way Scofield is remembered for More, assured, uncompromising, principled. In true cinematic style, he nearly didn’t get the role despite his success on stage with Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons. Columbia wanted Olivier but the director Fred Zinnemann supported Scofield. Richard Burton was busy and would have cost, according to O’Connor, £1 million. Scofield was finally signed for £26,000 plus 10% of the profits.

Characteristically, even despite the temptations following the receipt of an Oscar for Best Actor, Scofield went back to his first love – theatre (at it was reported £12 a week) and to BBC radio drama (often with Tydeman). He recorded Vershinin in The Three Sisters and Macbeth for the BBC. In 1967 he was back in Stratford with the Scottish play directed by Peter Hall which he then toured world wide.

The career continues steadily through the decades. More Shakespeare – Prospero and Othello – and even a musical, Expresso Bongo which showed he could sing. More films – as contrasted as Quiz Show produced by Robert Redford and The Crucible; TV – notably Martin Chuzzlewit; and a continuous stream of memorable theatre roles for which he continues to be identified, including Salieri in Amadeus, Uncle Vanya, Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann.

Michael Caine once said of him: ‘Paul’s first reading of a script is like everyone else’s opening night,’. And always voice recordings – Dickens on tape, narrations and radio dramas by the dozen. ‘Acting for the microphone simply demands total reliance on the voice – the actor is free of costumes, sets and can obey the inside of his head to allow his inner voice to speak,’

It is the last day of the recording. Outside, in the garden, it is more relaxed than ever. In the studio, the final act approaches. Mad Lear comes and hears a voice he recognises: ‘You are a spirit that I know,’ he says to Cordelia. Emilia Fox replies... and, for her, King Lear and Paul Scofield seem to merge. She can’t quite help herself and tears start to flow that the microphone cannot hear.

Lear/Scofield notices, and, without breaking his speech ‘Pray you now, forget and forgive,’ silently adjusts his script and draws her towards him.

On the dot of six, John Tydeman proclaims it is finished. In the garden, the champagne starts pouring – into mugs, mostly. Scofield is allotted the one flute glass. He drinks two glasses.

Kenneth Branagh had squeezed the recording in between two films but wouldn’t have missed it. (He knows the play intimately, having directed it himself with Richard Briers).

‘The combination of Paul’s age and experience as an actor and his familiarity with the role seemed to come together in the studio – he is still vocally so powerful,’ he said. ‘There is such a rich expanse of humanity in the play and he has now brought another forty years of living to inform his performance,’

Are Scofield’s theatre days over? ‘I shall continue to work in the theatre whenever a script tells me that I must,’ he declares directly. He packs his bag with his Lear script, turns to say goodbye to his colleagues, and leaves for his home in Sussex.

Nicolas Soames