Maurice Evans

Maurice Evans (3 June 1901 – 12 March 1989) was an English-born actor who became one of the most prominent interpreters of Shakespeare on the American stage and television. Born at 28 Icen Way in Dorchester, Dorset, he was the son of Laura (Turner) and Alfred Herbert Evans, a Welsh dispensing chemist and amateur actor who adapted Thomas Hardy novels for a local company. Evans made his first stage appearance as a child in a production of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Evans began his professional stage career in 1926 at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, where he was selected by Terence Gray to appear in the opening production in November of that year, taking a role in the Oresteia of Aeschylus. That same season he played Lord Belvoir in The Man Who Ate the Popomack and Saint Anthony in Maeterlinck's The Miracle of Saint Anthony. Throughout 1927 he took on a wide range of roles at the Festival Theatre, including parts in works by W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Elmer Rice, Pirandello, and Lord Dunsany, among others. Both Yeats and Shaw attended performances of their own plays during this period.

In 1928, Evans was among a group of actors including Laurence Olivier chosen to perform in a tryout of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, directed by James Whale at the Apollo Theatre in London. The production later transferred to the Savoy Theatre in 1929 and ran for two years, with Evans playing the young officer Raleigh. In 1934 he joined the Old Vic Company, where his portrayal of Richard II drew praise and led to an invitation to work with Katharine Cornell in the United States. He appeared opposite Cornell in the 1935 Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan, and his first credited Broadway appearance was alongside her in Romeo and Juliet in 1936. His Broadway career extended from 1935 to 1962.

Evans built an exceptional record on Broadway through his Shakespearean work. A production of Richard II became the surprise success of the 1937 theatre season, and he went on to play Hamlet in 1938, Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 in 1939, Macbeth in 1941, and Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 1942 opposite Helen Hayes as Viola, under the direction of Margaret Webster. He appeared as Hamlet in four separate Broadway productions, with no other actor playing the role on Broadway between his 1938 debut in it and his final Broadway Hamlet in 1946, accumulating a total of 283 performances in the part.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Evans enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of Major. He led an Army Entertainment Section in the Central Pacific, producing dozens of shows for troops in the Pacific theater. During this period he arranged for Carl Reiner's transfer from the Signal Corps to the entertainment unit in Hawaii, where Evans served as his commanding officer. Evans also produced a condensed "G.I. version" of Hamlet designed to appeal to military audiences, a version he subsequently brought to Broadway in 1945.

Following the war, Evans turned his attention substantially to the works of Shaw, playing John Tanner in Man and Superman and King Magnus in The Apple Cart. In 1952 he starred as the murderous husband in the original Broadway production of Dial M for Murder. He also produced Broadway productions in which he did not appear, among them The Teahouse of the August Moon. His Broadway credits further included The Aspern Papers, the musical Tenderloin, Heartbreak House, and The Apple Cart. In 1954 he received the Tony Award for Best Play.

Evans also made a significant mark on American television, appearing in more televised Shakespeare productions than any other actor. Beginning in 1953 with the Hallmark Hall of Fame anthology series, he starred in the first feature-length dramatizations of Shakespeare plays presented on American television, including Hamlet, Richard II, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, and two productions of Macbeth, both times alongside Judith Anderson, who won an Emmy for each of her performances as Lady Macbeth. Evans himself won an Emmy Award for the 1960 Macbeth production.

On screen, Evans played a villain in Kind Lady (1951), Emperor Antoninus in Androcles and the Lion (1952), and Sir Arthur Sullivan in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953). In 1968 he appeared as the orangutan Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes, a role he reprised in the 1970 sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and as "Hutch" in Rosemary's Baby. American television audiences of the 1960s also knew him as Samantha's father Maurice on the sitcom Bewitched. He additionally appeared in the fourth season of Daniel Boone as a French impresario and played The Puzzler in a two-part episode of Batman in December 1966. In 1956 he recorded an LP of stories from Winnie-the-Pooh. Later in his career, Carl Reiner cast Evans in the role of Hobart the butler in The Jerk.

Although Evans took U.S. citizenship in 1941, he returned to Britain by the end of the 1960s and lived near Brighton, making occasional visits to the United States as a longtime trustee of the Actors' Fund. He never married and was survived by a brother, Hugh, of London. In 1987 he published a memoir, All This and Evans Too, through the University of South Carolina Press. Evans died at the age of 87 in a nursing home in Rottingdean, East Sussex, England, on 12 March 1989.