Eric Maxon

Eric Maxon (22 May 1882 – 1963) was an English stage and film actor who maintained an active career on both sides of the Atlantic for more than four decades, with Broadway appearances spanning 1915 to 1947. Born Eric MacKay in Balham, London, he was the son of stockbroker Charles Stewart MacKay. He never married and died in Finsbury, London, in 1963.

Maxon began his professional stage career in 1907 when he joined the company of H.B. Irving, touring Britain in The Lyons Mail, The Bells, and Charles I — productions associated with Irving's father, the celebrated Henry Irving. Between 1909 and 1910 he appeared with actor-manager Frank Benson's company in The School for Scandal. In 1912 he traveled to Australia to appear in the stage production of Ben-Hur. His early screen work included the silent film Richard III (1911), in which he played Henry, Earl of Richmond, and After Dark (1915), in which he portrayed Captain Gordon Chadley. Maxon appears on the DVD Silent Shakespeare (2013), a collection of seven tinted short films drawn from the National Film and Television Archive Collection representing early attempts to adapt Shakespeare for cinema.

His association with the Royal Shakespeare Company began with their 1910–11 season, during which he appeared in a wide range of productions including The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Merchant of Venice, among others. He rejoined the RSC for their 1924 season and remained with the company for approximately the next twenty years, serving not only as an actor but also as a costume designer in the early 1930s. During that extended tenure he appeared in Othello, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, All's Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet, and Cymbeline, and took the title role in Julius Caesar in 1934. In the 1943 season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, he played a substantial roster of roles: Antonio in Twelfth Night, Montano in Othello, Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Duke of Exeter in Henry V, Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, Antigonus in The Winter's Tale, and the Earl of Leicester in The Critic.

Maxon's Broadway career opened in 1915 with appearances in The White Feather at the Comedy Theatre and Romeo and Juliet at the 44th Street Theatre. During a 1916 season at the New Amsterdam Theatre he appeared in Henry VIII, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Subsequent Broadway credits included The Lost Leader at the Greenwich Village Theatre in 1919, The Purple Mask at the Booth Theatre in 1920, and The Skylark at the Belmont Theatre in 1921. His final Broadway engagement came in 1947, when he opened at the New Century Theatre in a production that had originated in the 1943–44 season at the Scala Theatre in London. In that production he played the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, Corbaccio in Volpone, and Polonius in Hamlet. In 1951 he played Andrew MacKeith in the J.C. Williamson production of Brigadoon.