Sebastian Shaw

Sebastian Shaw (born May 29, 1905 in Holt, Norfolk , † December 23, 1994 in Brighton , East Sussex ) was a British actor , theater director and poet . With a career spanning over 65 years, he was one of the veterans of the British theater scene.

Previous life and career

Sebastian Shaw comes from a musical family. He was born as the son of the composer Dr. Geoffrey Shaw, the music teacher at the renowned Gresham's School , was born. He has two other siblings. His uncle Martin Shaw was a well-known church musician . Shaw grew up in Holt, a small market town in Norfolk. At the age of eight, he first appeared on stage in 1914 at the Royal Court Theater in the London borough of Chelsea at a New Year's performance. He attended Gresham's private school, where his father taught. During his school days, he appeared in a school play of the Shakespeare comedy The Taming of the Shrew . The future writer WH Auden was one of Shaw's classmates at the time. After graduating from school, Shaw initially wanted to be a painter and studied art at London's Slade School of Fine Art for two years before deciding to return to his old passion - acting. He received a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was a classmate of actor Charles Laughton during his training .

After attending drama school, Shaw began his career on the theater stage, performing in cities such as Bristol , Liverpool and Kingston upon Hull . From 1925 he was also back on the theater stages in London in various plays. He often played in plays by Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet , The Tempest and Henry V , where he himself often played leading roles. In 1929 Shaw made his Broadway debut in New York City , where he played the role of a murderer in a theatrical performance of Patrick Hamilton's play Rope's End . In the same year Shaw also married Margaret Delamere and from then on lived with her in the Albany complex in London . A daughter was born to the couple in 1932. In 1931 he returned to plays by William Shakespeare and appeared in performances such as Maß für Maß at the Fortune Playhouse and Romeo and Juliet at the London Embassy Theater . Shaw played his first film role in 1930 in the Castre production . Other various British film projects in which Shaw participated followed in the next few years. During this time, Shaw was making about £ 300 a week, which was even higher than the Prime Minister's at the time.

World War II and career thereafter

After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Shaw had to interrupt his acting career and was drafted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force . During the war years he worked his way up from the lowest rank of pilot officer to flight lieutenant . According to an interview with The Guardian , he was only marginally involved in the actual war. Even after the war, he was able to keep his status in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve to himself, after signing a suitable commission in February 1954. He was also allowed to keep his rank in the Air Force.

Upon his return to London, Shaw found that the war interruption had hurt his career. He lost his apartment in Albany and his contracts as an actor and was forced to build a new career step by step. Among other things, he was able to successfully use his military experience from the war for a pilot role in an educational film for recruits of the RAF. Acting colleagues Edward G. Robinson and Richard Attenborough also worked on the project .

In 1945 Shaw returned to the Embassy Theater to direct a stage adaptation of Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostoyevsky's novel The Gambler. This was Shaw's first independent work as a theater director. In the following ten years he was able to stabilize his career as a theater actor with various performances. In 1956 he became active in the musical field for the first time and wrote the text for All at Sea based on a self-composed ballad by his father. This was premiered at the Royal College of Music . In 1956, Shaw's wife Margaret died. After her death, Shaw began a relationship with Joan Ingpen, a well-known agent and manager in the music and opera fields. Ingpen even took Shaw's last name, which she kept until his death. In the 80s, Shaw also had a relationship with Harriet Ravenscroft, the mother of the famous DJ John Peel , whom he met at a performance in Ludlow . Since then, Shaw has lived in a kind of double relationship for years, commuting between the two women (Ingpen and Ravenscroft) on a weekly basis.

Royal Shakespeare Company and later career

In 1966 Shaw finally joined the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company , with which he could celebrate the next phase of his career. Since then he has traditionally appeared again in many Shakespeare performances such as Cymbeline , That ends well, Alles gut, and Richard II , where he was again seen in leading roles more often. Shaw has received praise from the press for his outstanding performance on the theater stage. Although there was also some criticism, since the pieces of the RSC were modernized more and more compared to the old originals, but Shaw always managed to successfully defend his company's productions against critics. In addition to his work at RCS on classic English plays, Shaw began to develop a taste for the works of Russian writers and starred in adaptations of Three Sisters and Ivanov , each of which was directed by the well-known theater director Jonathan Miller .

Even with increasing age, Shaw's career was not slowed down in any way, physically he was still extremely strong into old age. For example, after being robbed by a pickpocket, Shaw managed to catch up with him, wrestle him down and hold him until the police arrived. In addition to his long theater career, he has also been heard and seen again and again in television and radio productions. As a film actor, Shaw can look back on over 50 different films. He played a very short, but still one of his most famous portrayals in the film industry in 1983 in the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi, produced by Howard G. Kazanjian . Here he was seen for about two minutes as the unmasked Darth Vader at the side of the younger actor Mark Hamill . Although the role of the Sith Lord was played most of the film by the bodybuilder David Prowse , they wanted a professional actor with many years of experience for what is probably the most emotional scene in the film and therefore turned to Shaw. Surprisingly, this short film appearance earned him more fan mail and autograph requests than he had ever received for any of his other roles. In the final scene of Return of the Jedi , Shaw was seen as a power spirit . In a later post-production of the scene, he was replaced by Hayden Christensen .

Shaw's longtime friends and colleagues included actors Ian Richardson and John Nettles , with whom he frequently gave interviews to teachers and students about the art of acting. The now over eighty-year-old actor played one of his last roles as the Wizard of Oz in a performance of The Wizard of Oz , which took place in London's Barbican Center . Throughout his life, Shaw was also an honored member of the Garrick Club , an artist group to which celebrities such as Charles Dickens , JM Barrie and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had belonged in the past .

death

Shaw died on December 23, 1994 at the age of 89 in Brighton , Sussex . A devotional for him was held on February 15, 1995 at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden . In attendance were old Shaw actors like Ian Richardson and Ben Kingsley , but also younger actors like Kenneth Branagh . Songs were sung and various literary texts read aloud, including some of Shaw's own poetic poems. Shaw left behind his daughter Drusilla MacLeod and his long-time partner Joan Ingpen, who carried Shaw's last name until his death.

Filmography

• 1930: Caste
• 1933: Little Miss Nobody
• 1933: House of Dreams
• 1933: Taxi to Paradise
• 1934: The Way of Youth
• 1934: The Four Masked Men
• 1934: Get Your Men
• 1934: Adventurers Ltd.
• 1935: Brewster's Millions
• 1935: The Lad
• 1935: The Ace of Spades
• 1935: Three Witnesses
• 1935: Jubilee Window
• 1935: Department Store
• 1936: Tomorrow We Live
• 1936: Birds of a Feather
• 1936: Jury's Evidence
• 1936: Men Are Not Gods
• 1937: Farewell Again
• 1937: The Squeaker
• 1938: Julius Caesar
• 1939: Too Dangerous to Live
• 1939: Prison Without Bars
• 1939: Table d'Hote
• 1939: The Spy in Black (The Spy in Black)
• 1940: Now You're Talking
• 1940: Three Silent Men
• 1940: Bulldog Sees It Through
• 1940: The Flying Squad
• 1941: East of Piccadilly
• 1946: Journey Together
• 1947: Hamlet
• 1949: The Glass Mountain
• 1949: landfall
• 1953: Laxdale Hall
• 1960: Read Miss Sabry here
• 1966: It Happened Here
• 1968: All's Well That Ends Well
• 1968: A Midsummer Night's Dream
• 1981: Timon of Athens
• 1983: The Weather in the Streets
• 1983: Return of the Jedi (as Anakin Skywalker) (later marketed as Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi )
• 1987: High Season
• 1988: The Master Builder
• 1988: Casualty (TV series)
• 1989: Chelworth
• 1991: Chernobyl: The Final Warning
• 1991: Chimera

Web links

• Sebastian Shaw in the Internet Movie Database (English)