Kenneth Haigh

Kenneth Haigh (born March 25, 1931 in Mexborough , United Kingdom - † February 4, 2018 in London ) was a British actor in stage, film and television.

Live and act

Training, career start and breakthrough

Haigh attended Gunnersbury Grammar School in London and, as a young adult, received his artistic training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the early 1950s . Immediately afterwards he began working on the theater; Haigh toured Ireland in 1952 with Anew McMaster's repertory stage and Shakespeare's Othello (where he played Cassio as the successor to Harold Pinter ). In 1954, working in front of the camera (television and cinema) was added. Haigh rose to fame as one of the “young savages” of British theater when he played Jimmy Porter, a “typical” working class representative, in the world premiere of John Osborne's stage drama Look Back in Anger in 1956 at the Royal Court Theater . At that time, critic Kenneth Tynan expressly praised Haigh's “brilliant performance” at the side of his very young colleague Mary Ure . Haigh also played Jimmy in the Broadway performance two years later. Since Haigh's name had little appeal outside of Great Britain, however, his much more famous Welsh colleague Richard Burton was engaged in 1958 to play the lead role of Porter in the film adaptation of Tony Richardson of the same name.

Success in film and television

Since then, Haigh has played tough guys of all kinds on this side of the Atlantic in a plethora of television productions, including as a guest on series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents , Playhouse 90, Secret Mission for John Drake and Incredible Stories . But he also worked with supporting roles in sometimes ambitious movie productions (such as Otto Preminger's Die heilige Johanna ); At the side of his former rival Burton, who once snatched the porter role from under his nose, Haigh was seen in the 1963 American monumental film Cleopatra as the Caesar murderer Brutus. In 1971 Haigh, of all people, was allowed to play a character named Richard F. Burton , a 19th century African explorer, in the series In Search of the Sources of the Nile . The following year, Haigh returned to his acting beginnings and again embodied a boisterous representative of the proletariat in Man at the Top . Here Kenneth Haigh embodied Joe Lampton, a guy who strives for social advancement in early post-war England with all his might. This story was based on John Brain's novel Room at the Top . Towards the end of the series (1972), Haigh also played Lampton in a Man of the Top movie adaptation.

death

Haigh's death in 2018 was a long-term consequence of a food accident that he suffered in 2003: He choked on a bone in a restaurant in London's Soho district and was hospitalized. As a result of a lack of oxygen, Haigh's brain was so damaged that he became a nursing care case for the remaining 15 years of his life.

Filmography

• 1954: The Coiners
• 1954: Companions in Crime
• 1955: Madeleine
• 1955: The Dance Dress
• 1956: Are girls allowed to love at 16? (My Teenage Daughter)
• 1956: Saint Joan (Saint Joan)
• 1957: Comrades of the Air (High Flight)
• 1959: Ten Little Indians
• 1962: Cleopatra
• 1962: Captain Brassbound's Conversion
• 1964: Yeah Yeah Yeah (A Hard Day's Night)
• 1964: Dunkirk, June 2, 1940 (Week-end à Zuydcoote)
• 1966: The Last Invasion
• 1966: Call for a Dead ( The Deadly Affair )
• 1967: The Fastest Way to the Afterlife (A Lovely Way to Die)
• 1970: A certain General Bonaparte (Eagle in a Cage)
• 1972: Man at the Top
• 1975: Moll Flanders
• 1975: Robin and Marian (Robin and Marian)
• 1976: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• 1977: Hazlitt in Love
• 1979: Lady Diamond (The Bitch)
• 1981: Troilus & Cressida
• 1984: Night Train to Murder
• 1984: Wild Geese 2 (Wild Geese II)
• 1986: A State of Emergency
• 1990: Lorna Doone
• 1992: Badminton (Shuttlecock)
• 1996: The Ring
• 2003: Mr. Blue (short film)

Web links

• Kenneth Haigh in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Obituary in The Times on February 12, 2018
• Obituary in The Guardian on February 13, 2018