Ian Richardson

Ian William Richardson CBE (7 April 1934 – 9 February 2007) was a Scottish actor born in Edinburgh, the only son and eldest of three children of John Richardson and Margaret Pollock. His father worked as a manager at the McVitie & Price factory, where, according to Richardson, John Richardson invented the Jaffa cake. Richardson was educated at Balgreen Primary School, Tynecastle High School, and George Heriot's School. He made his first stage appearance at age 14 in an amateur production of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. A director who saw him perform encouraged his talent while advising him to lose his Scottish accent; his mother subsequently arranged elocution lessons. He went on to work as a stage manager with the semi-professional Edinburgh People's Theatre before completing National Service in the Army, during part of which he served as an announcer and drama director with the British Forces Broadcasting Service. He then trained at the College of Dramatic Arts in Glasgow.

Richardson's professional stage career began at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where his performance as Hamlet led to an invitation to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. He became a founding member of the RSC and remained with the company from 1960 to 1975, playing a wide range of roles across tragedy, comedy, and villainy. Among his notable RSC credits were the title role in Coriolanus (1967), Cassius in Julius Caesar (1968), Angelo in Measure for Measure (1970), Iachimo in Cymbeline, the title role in Pericles (1969), Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost (1973), and the title role in Richard III (1975). In 1974, his Richard II, in which he alternated the roles of the king and Bolingbroke with Richard Pasco, was repeated in New York and London the following year.

Richardson's Broadway career spanned from 1965 to 1981. He first came to Broadway through the RSC's transfer of Peter Brook's production of The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, having played The Herald in the London production in 1964. In the New York transfer he took the lead role of Jean-Paul Marat, becoming the first actor to appear nude on the Broadway stage. He repeated the role for the 1967 film version of Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook. After leaving the RSC, Richardson played Professor Henry Higgins in the twentieth-anniversary Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1976, for which he received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical and a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. In 1981, he appeared on Broadway as the onstage narrator in the original production of Edward Albee's Lolita, an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel that was not critically well received.

Beyond Broadway, Richardson maintained an extensive career in film and television. He played the pivotal spy Bill Haydon in the BBC's adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in 1979 and went on to portray Conservative politician Francis Urquhart in the BBC's House of Cards television trilogy from 1990 to 1995, the role for which he became most widely recognized. He played Sherlock Holmes in two critically acclaimed television films, The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, both produced in 1983. His other screen credits included roles in Brazil (1985), M. Butterfly, and Dark City, as well as Major Neuheim in the award-winning Private Schulz and Sir Godber Evans in Channel 4's adaptation of Porterhouse Blue. He portrayed Anthony Blunt in the BBC film Blunt: the Fourth Man (1986) opposite Anthony Hopkins, and played Jawaharlal Nehru in Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986).

Richardson continued to work on stage throughout his later career. In 1972, he appeared in the musical Trelawney with the Bristol Old Vic, playing Tom Wrench, a role that transferred to London's Sadler's Wells Theatre and later the Prince of Wales Theatre. In 1995 he played The Miser at Chichester, and in 1997 he appeared there as The Magistrate, a production that transferred to the Savoy Theatre. In 2002, he joined Derek Jacobi, Donald Sinden, and Diana Rigg in an international tour of The Hollow Crown, which was repeated the following year. His final stage appearance came in 2006, when he played Sir Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist at the National Theatre in London. Richardson died on 9 February 2007.