Anthony Quayle

Anthony Quayle, born John Anthony Quayle on 7 September 1913 at 2 Delamere Road, Ainsdale, Southport, Lancashire, was a British actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than five decades. The son of solicitor Arthur Quayle, of Manx family heritage, and Esther Kate Quayle, née Overton, he was educated at Abberley Hall School in Worcestershire and Rugby School before training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His first professional stage appearance came during a holiday from RADA, when he performed in The Ghost Train at the Q Theatre. After work in music hall, he joined the Old Vic in 1932. Quayle was knighted in the 1985 New Year Honours for services to the theatre and died on 20 October 1989 in Chelsea from liver cancer.

During the Second World War, Quayle served in the Royal Artillery, enlisting as a gunner and receiving his commission as second lieutenant on 7 January 1940 following attendance at the 70th Coast Defence Training Regiment. He served as one of the area commanders of the Auxiliary Units in Northumberland, which were organized as stay-behind forces in the event of a German invasion. He subsequently joined the Special Operations Executive and served as a liaison officer with partisans in Albania, an experience he described as deeply affecting and one he rarely discussed directly. He later drew on that service in his 1945 novel Eight Hours from England, a semi-fictional account published by Heinemann. He was also present in Gibraltar at the time of the air crash that killed General Władysław Sikorski on 4 July 1943, an experience he wrote about in his second novel, On Such a Night, published by Heinemann in 1947. By the war's end he held the rank of temporary major and was mentioned in despatches in May 1946 in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in the Mediterranean Theatre.

From 1948 to 1956, Quayle directed at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and contributed to laying the groundwork for what would become the Royal Shakespeare Company. His Shakespearean roles during this period included Falstaff, Othello, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Henry VIII, and Aaron in Titus Andronicus alongside Laurence Olivier. He also played Mosca in Ben Jonson's Volpone. In 1958, he took the role of James Tyrone in the first UK production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Globe Theatre in London. In 1984, he founded Compass Theatre Company, inaugurating it with a tour of The Clandestine Marriage in which he directed and played Lord Ogleby, a production that subsequently ran at the Albery Theatre in London. The company later toured productions including Saint Joan, Dandy Dick, and King Lear, with Quayle in the title role of the latter.

Quayle made his Broadway debut in The Country Wife in 1936, beginning an association with the New York stage that extended through 1978. His Broadway credits include The Firstborn, in which he played Moses opposite Katharine Cornell in Christopher Fry's play, as well as Galileo, Halfway Up the Tree, and Do You Turn Somersaults?. His most celebrated Broadway appearance came in Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, for which he received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance in 1971. In the mid-1970s, Quayle served as artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee, where he was appointed professor of theatre in 1974. Through a partnership with the Kennedy Center, he starred in Henry Denker's The Headhunters, which opened at the Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville before transferring to the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theatre. He also served as artistic director of the Clarence Brown Company, a professional theatre company in residence at the university.

Quayle's film career began with an uncredited appearance as an Italian wigmaker in Pygmalion in 1938. He went on to appear in a substantial number of major productions, including Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Battle of the River Plate, both in 1956, followed by Ice Cold in Alex in 1958 and Tarzan's Greatest Adventure in 1959. He appeared in The Guns of Navarone in 1961, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, and The Fall of the Roman Empire in 1964. His role as Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in Anne of the Thousand Days in 1969 earned him nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. Additional film credits include Operation Crossbow in 1965 and The Eagle Has Landed in 1976. On television, he starred in the ITC drama series Strange Report in 1969, appeared in the miniseries Masada in 1981 as Rubrius Gallius, and won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Comedy or Drama Special for QB VII in 1975. He also narrated the BBC serial The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1970 and the aviation documentary series Reaching for the Skies in 1988.

Quayle was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1952 Birthday Honours and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 5 March 1985. He married twice: first to actress Hermione Hannen from 1935 to 1941, and then in 1947 to American-born actress Dorothy Hyson, with whom he had two daughters, Jenny and Rosanna, and a son, Christopher. In addition to his two novels, he published an autobiography, A Time to Speak, in 1990 through Barrie and Jenkins.