Michael Hordern

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Sir Michael Murray Hordern (October 3, 1911 – May 2, 1995) was an English actor, knighted in 1983 for his services to the theatre.

Early life

Hordern was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and educated at Brighton College, as was his brother Peter. He acted at school and then as an amateur with the St. Pancras People's Theatre. He worked as a schoolteacher and travelling salesman before going into the profession. In 1937, he made his professional stage début at the People's Palace, East London, playing a minor role in Othello, and later in the year joined the repertory company of the Little Theatre in Bristol. It was here that he met his future wife, the actress Eve Mortimer with whom he was married between 1943 and 1986. They had one daughter, Joanna.

On stage

His stage work, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and in London, at the Old Vic and in the West End demonstrated his wide range and his remarkable voice. In addition to his many Shakespearean roles (Jaques in As You Like It, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Polonius in Hamlet, Malvolio in Twelfth Night), Hordern performed in plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinero, Pinter, Dürrenmatt, Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, David Mercer and Tom Stoppard.

Perhaps his greatest performances on stage were as King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1970. He repeated his performance for the BBC Television Shakespeare series in 1982, undoubtedly one of the high points of that series. In 1978 he returned to Stratford to play a wise Prospero in The Tempest, equally admired. This was also repeated for the BBC Shakespeare series in 1980.

Film, television and radio

He made more than a hundred film appearances, usually in character roles, including Passport to Pimlico (1949), Scrooge (1951, as Jacob Marley; he was to play Ebenezer Scrooge himself in a 1977 TV adaptation), The Heart of the Matter (1953), The Spanish Gardener (1956), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), El Cid (1961), Cleopatra (1963), The V.I.P.s (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Khartoum (1966), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), England Made Me (1972), Juggernaut (1974), Shogun (1980), Gandhi (1982). In 1968 he appeared as the central character in Jonathan Miller's television adaptation of M. R. James' ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad and, perhaps coincidentally, some years later narrated nineteen unabridged supernatural stories by M. R. James, released across four audio cassette collections by Argo Records (UK) in the 1980s. In 1992 Hordern narrated the two-cassette recording of the John Mortimer story Rumpole on Trial.

Hordern was also in demand for other voice-over work. As the narrator of FilmFair Production's Paddington Bear, and as the voice of Badger in Cosgrove Hall's Wind in the Willows, his soothing voice will be familiar to TV audiences everywhere. He also provided the ironic voice-over narration in Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, and can be heard playing the part of the rabbits' god Frith in Martin Rosen's 1978 cartoon adaptation of Richard Adams' Watership Down

On radio he played Gandalf in the BBC's radio adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1981); another great wizard, Merlin, in an adaptation of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1982); and P. G. Wodehouse's famous indefatigable valet (or gentleman's gentleman) Jeeves in several series in the 1970s.

Sir Michael Hordern's abridged 1991 readings of the complete series of C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia remains a classic rendering of the series.

Later years

On television, he played Tartuffe for the BBC and appeared in several classic drama serials, one of his last performances being in Middlemarch (1994).

In 1956 he had bought a house near Newbury in Berkshire, where he spent his final years close to the river Lambourn on which he had enjoyed fishing (for trout and grayling) for so long.

Shortly before his death from a kidney disease, Brighton College named a room in his honour where a bronze portrait bust stands; the National Portrait Gallery in London has another copy.

Bibliography

• Robin Armstrong, The Painted Stream, Dent, 1985, ISBN 0-460-04702-7 (foreword by Hordern)

External links

• Michael Hordern at the Internet Movie Database

References

The Internet Movie Database (full cast of Watership Down)

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