Richard Easton

Richard Easton (March 22, 1933 – December 2, 2019) was a Canadian stage, television, and film actor born in Montreal, Quebec, the son of Mary Louise (née Withington) and Leonard Idell Easton, a civil engineer. He began acting in a children's theatre group and played Hamlet in high school, studying under Eleanor Stuart. His professional debut came at the Brae Manor Playhouse in 1947, and in 1951, at seventeen, he relocated to Ottawa to join the Canadian Repertory Theatre. Two years later, in 1953, he became part of the Stratford Festival during its inaugural season, appearing in its inaugural production of Richard III as Sir Thomas Vaughan.

Easton's early stage career took him through several prominent institutions. He appeared in a 1955 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of King Lear as Edgar, then moved through six Crest Theatre productions in Toronto between 1956 and 1958, including The School for Scandal, The Italian Straw Hat, The Three Sisters, Antony and Cleopatra, She Stoops to Conquer, and Salad Days. His first New York appearance came in 1957 through an off-Broadway production by the Phoenix Theatre, followed by work at the Stratford, Connecticut Shakespeare Festival. He received a Theatre World Award in 1958. With the APA Repertory, he played Hamlet in 1961, Berenger in Exit the King in 1967, and Alceste in The Misanthrope in 1969, before taking on the role of Claudius in a 1969 Lyceum Theatre production of Hamlet.

From 1972 to 1976, Easton portrayed Brian Hammond in the BBC serial The Brothers, a role for which he became widely recognized. He also made television guest appearances on Doctor Who, L.A. Law, Frasier, and Ed. Following The Brothers, he worked in British repertory theatre and then with the Royal Shakespeare Company until 1986, when he joined the Renaissance Theatre Company. With the Renaissance company, he played Jaques in As You Like It and Claudius in Hamlet.

Easton's Broadway career spanned from 1957 to 2013 and included a number of significant productions. In 2001, he played A. E. Housman, aged 77, in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, earning both the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play. That same year he appeared in a Royal National Theatre production of Noises Off as Selsdon Mowbray. In 2003, he played Henry IV in a Lincoln Center production of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. He appeared in both Part 1 (Voyage) and Part 2 (Shipwreck) of Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater in 2006, playing Alexander Bakunin, Leonty Ibayev, and Stanislaw Worcell. During the second preview of that production on October 18, 2006, Easton suffered a heart attack and collapsed on stage. Co-star Martha Plimpton recognized the seriousness of his fall and called for a doctor; a stagehand performed CPR until an ambulance arrived, and Easton was revived with defibrillation. He subsequently underwent a procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia, briefly delaying the play's opening, before making a full recovery and returning to the production. He also appeared on Broadway in The Rivalry and, in 2010, played Alfons in Elling.

Beyond the stage, Easton starred in the title role of Benjamin Franklin, a three-part PBS documentary, in 2002, and between 2005 and 2011 reprised the role of Benjamin Franklin in a series of commercials and videos produced for the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts A.F. & A.M. In 2011, he made a guest appearance in the second season of Boardwalk Empire as Jackson Parkhurst in the episode "Gimcrack & Bunkum." He also provided the voice of Nigel in the video game Grand Theft Auto V. In 2008, Easton was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. He died on December 2, 2019, at the age of 86.