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Nigel Hawthorne
Life Time
5 April 1929 - 26 December 2001
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British actor Nigel Hawthorne was born on 5 April 1924 in Coventry, Warwickshire. When he was three years old, his family moved to Cape Town, South Africa. He received his primary education at the Catholic College of Christian Brothers, later entered the University of Cape Town, but never finished it, deciding against the desire of the family to become an actor. Debuting on stage in April 1951, he went to England the same year to try his luck. However, he never managed to achieve any noticeable
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British actor Nigel Hawthorne was born on 5 April 1924 in Coventry, Warwickshire. When he was three years old, his family moved to Cape Town, South Africa. He received his primary education at the Catholic College of Christian Brothers, later entered the University of Cape Town, but never finished it, deciding against the desire of the family to become an actor. Debuting on stage in April 1951, he went to England the same year to try his luck. However, he never managed to achieve any noticeable results, and after several years of continuous failures, Hawthorne returned to Cape Town. However, he did not stay in Cape Town for long and returned to Britain in 1962. The second attempt was much more successful - three years later he was accepted by the company of the theater-workshop Joan Littlewood and subsequently had some success, playing in theaters in London's West End. However, it took many years before his talent was appreciated.
Since the mid-sixties, Hawthorne starred on television, and in 1972 he first appeared on the big screen in a cameo role in Richard Attenborough's historical novel Young Winston. For a long time, he remained virtually unknown to a wide audience, acting in casual roles, and only in the eighties he became recognizable by millions of television viewers after playing the cunning Deputy Minister Sir Humphrey Appleby in the satirical series Yes, Minister (1980-1984). The series was very popular and had a sequel - "Yes, Prime Minister" (1986-1988).
The nineties were a triumphant decade for the actor. In 1991, for the role of the writer Lewis in the play based on the play by William Nicholson “Land of Shadows”, he was awarded the American Theatre Tony Award, and the following year he received the Laurence Olivier Award for the main role in the play “The Madness of King George III”. No less successful was the on-screen version of this play, in which Hawthorne played - George struck him with psychological authenticity, unusual depth and naturalness of the emotions he experienced. A year after the release of Nicholas Hitner’s historical drama The Madness of King George (1994), Hawthorne was nominated for an Oscar as the best lead actor. And although he never received this prestigious award, at home he was awarded the prize of the British Academy of Film and Television and the Association of London Critics.
His most interesting roles in cinema can also be attributed to Arthur Winslow in the film adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play "Winslow Boy" (1999, dir. David Mamet), as well as two Shakespearean characters - Duke Clarence in Richard III (1995, dir. Richard Loncrane) and Malvolio in "Trenadza" (1996). The actor also occasionally worked in Hollywood, starring in several films, among which the historical drama Amistad (1997) by Steven Spielberg deserves a special mention. In 1999, Nigel Hawthorne was awarded the title of nobility. The actor tried as much as possible to protect himself from the attention of the media and did not advertise the details of his private life. For the past nearly two decades, he has lived with his gay partner, screenwriter Trevor Bentham, in the quiet countryside of Hertfordshire. It was Hawthorne who was planned for the role of the wizard Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s film The Lord of the Rings, but this never came true – on April 26, 2001, Sir Nigel Hawthorne died of a heart attack. One of his last significant works was the role of King Lear in the play of the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged by Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa in 1999.
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