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Harcourt Williams
Life Time
30 March 1880 - 13 December 1957
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Ernest George Harcourt Williams was born on March 30, 1880 in Croydon, County Surrey, England. He began playing on stage in 1900 in London, as part of the troupe of Frank Benson. He performed with leading English theater actors of the time: George Alexander, Ellen Terry, Henry Brodribb Irving. Since 1908 he was married to actress Jean Sterling McKinley, with whom he lived all his life. In 1911 he played Count O'Dowd in the earliest production of George Bernard Shaw's Fanny's First Play. The war
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Ernest George Harcourt Williams was born on March 30, 1880 in Croydon, County Surrey, England. He began playing on stage in 1900 in London, as part of the troupe of Frank Benson. He performed with leading English theater actors of the time: George Alexander, Ellen Terry, Henry Brodribb Irving. Since 1908 he was married to actress Jean Sterling McKinley, with whom he lived all his life. In 1911 he played Count O'Dowd in the earliest production of George Bernard Shaw's Fanny's First Play. The war temporarily interrupted Williams' acting career; but in 1919, after serving, he returned to the stage. From 1929 to 1934 he worked as a production director at the Old Vic Theatre in London, where he produced a number of innovative productions of William Shakespeare’s plays, treating them more ambiguously than has been accepted so far, thereby departing from the old traditions of Victorian and Elizabethan theater. And if at first Williams’ creative innovations were met rather skeptically, then later his approach to staging the classics of English literature was proclaimed epochal. In addition to Shakespeare's plays, he also staged plays The Dark Lady of Sonnets and Androcles and the Lion by Bernard Shaw. In 1935, Harcourt Williams published a book of memoirs "Four Years at the Old Vic", dedicated to the years of work in the legendary theater. He made his film debut in the mid-40s as the French king in Laurence Olivier's film Henry V (1944, based on the play by W. Shakespeare). After World War II, in 1946, Williams returned to the Old Vic, but until the end of his life he continued to act in films - among the most famous films with his participation "Hamlet" (1948, Lawrence Olivier), the comedy "It's the opposite" (1948, dir. Peter Ustinov), "Under the sign of Capricorn" (1949, dir. Alfred Hitchcock), "Roman Holiday" (1953, dir. William Wyler), "Around the world in eight days" (1956, Michael Anderson). He died in London on December 13, 1957.