Stephen Haggard

Stephen Hubert Avenel Haggard (21 March 1911 – 25 February 1943) was a British actor, writer, and poet whose Broadway appearances spanned 1934 to 1938. Born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, he was the son of Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard, a British diplomat, and Georgianna Ruel Haggard. A member of the distinguished Haggard family, he was the great-nephew of novelist H. Rider Haggard and the brother of Virginia Haggard, a photographer and author who became the companion of painter Marc Chagall. His granddaughter is the actor Daisy Haggard, and his son is the director Piers Haggard. Haggard received his early education at Haileybury College, where he developed a close relationship with artist and schoolmaster Wilfrid Blunt.

Before committing fully to the stage, Haggard briefly pursued journalism. Seeking overseas experience, he relocated to Munich, where he trained at the Munich State Theatres under Frau Magda Lena. His professional stage debut came in October 1930 at the Schauspielhaus in Das kluge Kind, directed by Max Reinhardt, and he subsequently performed the role of Hamlet at the same venue. Returning to the United Kingdom in 1931, he found early progress slow, taking small parts in London productions and working in repertory in Worthing. He undertook further training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and his performance as Silvius in Shakespeare's As You Like It in London in 1933 earned him favorable notices. That production brought him to the attention of playwright Clemence Dane.

Haggard made his Broadway debut in 1934, cast by Dane as the poet Thomas Chatterton in her play Come of Age. Back in Britain, he accumulated a series of notable stage credits, among them Flowers of the Forest, a production of Mazo de la Roche's Whiteoaks, and the role of Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull. In 1938 he returned to Broadway to reprise his role as Finch in Whiteoaks, which he also directed. That same year his novel Nya was published by Faber and Faber.

Haggard also worked in film during this period. He portrayed Mozart in Whom the Gods Love (1936), though the film met with limited success. He appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939) and later played Lord Nelson in Carol Reed's The Young Mr. Pitt (1942). Haggard married Morna Gillespie in September 1935; the couple had three children, one of whom died young.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Haggard joined the British Army, attaining the rank of captain in the Intelligence Corps. His wife and two sons traveled to the United States in 1940, where his father was serving as consul-general in New York. Shortly after their departure, Haggard composed a letter to his sons that was published in the Atlantic Monthly that same year under the title "I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter to His Sons." Posted to the Middle East, he worked for the Department of Political Warfare, where he encountered author Olivia Manning and her husband, broadcaster R. D. Smith. Smith cast Haggard in starring roles in radio productions of Henry V and Hamlet broadcast locally in Jerusalem. Manning later drew on Haggard as the basis for the character Aidan Sheridan in her Fortunes of War novel sequence.

Haggard died on 25 February 1943 at the age of 31, on a train between Cairo and Palestine. He is buried in Heliopolis War Cemetery in Cairo, Egypt. A biography by Christopher Hassall, The Timeless Quest: Stephen Haggard, was published in 1948. Several of his written works appeared posthumously, including I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter to His Sons (1944), The Unpublished Poems of Stephen Haggard (1945), and The Craft of Comedy (1946), co-authored with Athene Seyler.