Paul Scofield, the acclaimed British actor who created the indelible role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons” and then repeated it on film in 1966 in an Oscar-winning performance, died Wednesday near his home in southern England. He was 86.
His death, at a hospital, was announced by his agent, Rosalind Chatto. He had leukemia.
Mr. Scofield was regarded by both critics and his peers as one of the greatest actors in the English-speaking world, one who brought freshness and power to Hamlet, King Lear and many other classic roles. But he might have been better known to the public if he had been less withdrawn. He seldom gave interviews and never appeared on television talk shows. A shy, reclusive man, he refused to accept the knighthood that was offered him in the 1960s.
He was a wide-ranging actor who, thanks to his bearing and his height — he stood 6 feet 2 — could project power and authority in one role and an air of inscrutability in another.
Richard Eyre, who directed Mr. Scofield in the title role in Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman” in 1996, maintained that he was “not just the best there is, but the best there has ever been.”
Doomed lord chancellor
The role that brought Mr. Scofield international renown was that of Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” which opened in London in 1960. The mix of moral strength, intelligence, melancholy and wily grace he brought to Henry VIII’s principled but ultimately disgraced lord chancellor won him a Tony Award when he made his Broadway debut in the role in 1961. That was followed by an Academy Award as best actor in the movie version of the play in 1966.
Despite his prodigious gifts and international fame, when the curtain fell, Mr. Scofield simply hopped the commuter train back to his family. He did not often mix socially with his fellow actors. At home, only 10 miles or so from his birthplace, was his wife, the former Joy Parker, an actress he married in 1943; a daughter, Sarah, and a son, Martin. They all survive him.
Mr. Scofield served as a director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1966 to 1968 and as an associate director of the National Theater from 1970 to 1972.
Paul Scofield was born David Scofield on Jan. 21, 1922, in the Sussex village of Hurstpierpoint.
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In 1939 he enrolled at a school attached to the Croydon Repertory Theater. Mr. Scofield was exempt from military service because of deformed toes.
His big break came in 1944, when, at 22, he was asked to join one of Britain’s most important companies, the Birmingham Repertory Theater. The next year, a 20-year-old director and enfant terrible named Peter Brook arrived at Birmingham, and a unique collaboration was struck. The partnership culminated in Mr. Scofield’s memorable King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962. In 2004, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in an opinion poll, cited Mr. Scofield’s portrayal of Lear as the greatest performance in a Shakespearean play.
Among the first fruits of the Brook-Scofield partnership were a brilliant Tanner in Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” a magnetic Bastard in Shakespeare’s “King John” and a grim Dr. Mangel in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea.”
Mr. Scofield then stormed London, first as Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s “Adventure Story” and then in Brook’s production of Jean Anouilh’s “Ring Round the Moon,” in which he played identical twins, one a heartless rogue, the other a retiring, ingenuous fellow.
Generation’s top actor
By the 1950s, Mr. Scofield was established as the leading actor of his generation, the natural successor to the ruling triumvirate of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson.
Inevitably Mr. Scofield came to the attention of Hollywood. He had turned down the offer of a seven-year film contract in 1946. But in 1955 he made his screen debut, playing King Philip of Spain opposite Olivia de Havilland in a period movie called “That Lady,” for which he won a British Film Academy Award. But Mr. Scofield resisted the temptation to move to Hollywood, explaining that too many actors simply moldered there.
After “A Man for All Seasons,” Mr. Scofield’s film appearances were sporadic. In 1971, he played the title role in the film version of Brook’s “King Lear”; in 1973, he played opposite Katharine Hepburn in an adaptation of Edward Albee’s “Delicate Balance.” There were also television movies, like a 1985 rendering of “Anna Karenina” with Jacqueline Bisset and Christopher Reeve.
But Mr. Scofield remained mainly a man of the stage. When he took on a role, he said, he ignored the advice of friends and agents, did not take money into consideration and listened only to his inner voice.
That inner voice also played a part in Mr. Scofield’s rehearsals, which were painstaking yet ultimately based on instinct. He arrived in the rehearsal room without plans or preconceptions, trusting that he would discover some aspect of the character on which he could build a lively performance — a voice, sometimes a walk, perhaps a hairstyle or a key phrase.
In the 1980s and ’90s, he took fewer and fewer roles on the stage. But he did turn in some striking performances in feature films, notably, opposite Mel Gibson, as the ghost in Franco Zefferelli’s version of “Hamlet”; as the American professor Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford’s “Quiz Show” (1994); as Judge Thomas Danforth in “The Crucible” (1996), with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.
His last stage performance, in Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman” at the National Theater in 1996, was a critical triumph. He then slipped out of public view.