Hordern, Sir Michael Murray

Hordern, Sir Michael Murray (1911–95), English actor, an amateur with the St Pancras People's Theatre for several seasons before making his professional début in 1937. After serving in the Navy during the Second World War he returned to the stage in 1946 as Torvald Helmer in Ibsen's A Doll's House and also played Bottom in Purcell's masque The Fairy Queen at Covent Garden. He was at Stratford-upon-Avon at Christmas 1948 and 1949 to play Mr Toad in Toad of Toad Hall, A. A. Milne's adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, and was then seen in the title-role of Chekhov's Ivanov (1950) and in John Whiting's Saint's Day (1951). In 1952 he joined the company at Stratford, establishing himself as a first-rate classical actor and going from there to the Old Vic, where in 1954 he gave an excellent performance as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. After appearing in the West End as Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonington in Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma (1955), he greatly enhanced his reputation as the senile barrister, cavorting with mincing pomposity, in John Mortimer's The Dock Brief (1958), and then returned to the Old Vic to play Macbeth, and Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts. He followed Dürrenmatt's The Physicists for the RSC (1963) with Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking (1967) and Tom Stoppard's Enter a Free Man (1968). He then returned to the RSC in Albee's A Delicate Balance (1969), and in the same year was a memorable King Lear at Nottingham Playhouse under Jonathan Miller's direction. After his lecherous, agnostic clergyman in David Mercer's Flint (1970) he gave for the National Theatre one of his finest performances as George, the word-spinning, God-obsessed metaphysician in Stoppard's Jumpers (1972), and was also excellent in an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Manchester, 1977; London, 1979) and as Prospero in The Tempest at Stratford (1978). He later appeared in Sheridan's The Rivals (National Theatre, 1983) and Shaw's You Never Can Tell (1987). He was a remarkable actor who had few peers in the portrayal of quixotic eccentrics.