Hutt, William

Hutt, William (1920– ), Canadian actor-director, who was a student at Hart House Theatre in the University of Toronto, his birthplace, before playing in summer stock in Ontario and with the Canadian Repertory Theatre in Ottawa. In 1953, in its first season, he joined the Stratford (Ontario) Festival company, with which he has been almost continuously associated as an actor, director, and Associate Director (13 seasons). He toured extensively, initially with the Canadian Players in Canada and the USA and then with the Stratford company, being first seen in New York in Tyrone Guthrie's production of Marlowe's Tamburlaine in 1956. For Stratford he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival (1956), Chichester (1964), and led the company throughout Europe (1973) and Australia (1974). He played with the Bristol Old Vic in 1959 in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and in London in Waiting in the Wings (1960) by Noël Coward, in whose Sail Away he toured North America a year later. In 1964 he created the part of the lawyer in the Broadway production of Albee's Tiny Alice and in 1968 he was seen in New York in Shaw's Saint Joan, which he directed at Stratford in 1975. He returned to London in 1969 as Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Among other plays he directed for Stratford are Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1968, Much Ado about Nothing in 1971, As You Like It in 1972, and Turgenev's A Month in the Country in 1973. From 1976 to 1979 he was Artistic Director of Theatre London (Ontario). His prodigious range is exemplified in three King Lears (1961, 1972, 1988), the title-roles in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and in Titus Andronicus in 1978 and Timon of Athens in 1983, Wolsey in Henry VIII in 1986, and even Lady Bracknell in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in 1975. His work in the 1980s included leading roles in Peter Shaffer's Equus, Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, and Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. In 1989 he made his first appearance with the Shaw Festival.