Robert Speaight

Robert William Speaight (1904–1976) was a British actor and writer born in St. Margaret At Cliffe, Kent, England. He trained under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama, which was then housed in the Royal Albert Hall in London, and began performing in radio plays as early as 1927. He was the brother of George Speaight, the puppeteer.

Speaight rose to prominence through his performance as Becket in the original production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, a role that brought him to Broadway in 1938. He subsequently pursued Shakespearean roles and also worked as a director. In 1941–42 he played the title role in the first broadcast of the radio drama The Man Born to Be King. He recorded several works by T. S. Eliot, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets, and Thomas a-Becket's Sermon from Murder in the Cathedral. He also served as narrator for the 1943 film London 1942.

A Roman Catholic convert, Speaight produced a substantial body of written work encompassing criticism, essays, theatre history, and biography. His biographical subjects included Hilaire Belloc, Eric Gill, Ronald Knox, Teilhard de Chardin, Georges Vanier, Georges Bernanos, and François Mauriac. Gill had been a personal friend, and Speaight's 1966 biography of him omitted material concerning Gill's sexual conduct, details that did not become public until Fiona MacCarthy's 1989 biography. Among his other publications were William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (1954), Nature in Shakespearian Tragedy (1955), Christian Theatre (1960), Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History of Shakespearian Performance (1973), and the autobiography The Property Basket: Recollections of a Divided Life (1970). He also edited several volumes, including Letters from Hilaire Belloc (1958) and A Bridges-Adams Letter Book (1971).

Speaight married the Welsh actress Evelyn Bowen, with whom he had a son. The couple separated in 1939. Evelyn subsequently married the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, with whom she had three children.