Redgrave, Sir Michael Scudamore

Redgrave, Sir Michael Scudamore (1908–85), English actor, formerly a schoolmaster. He made his first appearance on the professional stage with the Liverpool Playhouse company, where he remained from 1934 to 1936, playing a wide variety of parts and marrying a fellow member of the company, Rachel Kempson (1910– ). In 1936 they were together at the Old Vic, where Redgrave made his first London appearance as Ferdinand in Love's Labour's Lost, his other roles including Horner in Wycherley's The Country Wife, in which he displayed a gift for comedy too rarely exploited. He joined Gielgud's repertory season at the Queen's Theatre in 1937 and was then seen at the Phoenix Theatre as Alexei Turbin in Bulgakov's The White Guard and as a richly comic Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night (both 1938). His first notable appearance in a modern play was as Harry in T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion (1939), after which in 1940 came an interesting Macheath in Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Charleston in Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock. After serving in the Royal Navy he returned to the theatre in 1943 as Rakitin in Turgenev's A Month in the Country, followed by the title-role in Thomas Job's Uncle Harry (1944) and Stjerbinsky in S. N. Behrman's adaptation of Werfel's Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1945). His first outstanding role in Shakespeare was Macbeth (1947; NY, 1948); he then played the Captain in Strindberg's The Father (also 1948), subsequently rejoining the Old Vic company at the New Theatre (see ALBERY), where in 1950 he played Hamlet for the first time. In 1951 he was at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, playing Richard II and Prospero in The Tempest, and he appeared in London a year later in Odets's Winter Journey (known in America as The Country Girl). Returning to Stratford in 1953, he played Shylock, King Lear, and Antony, and then deserted the classics for some years, being seen in Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates (London and NY, 1955) and N. C. Hunter's A Touch of the Sun (1958). In 1958 he also played Hamlet and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing at Stratford. A year later he starred in his own adaptation of Henry James's The Aspern Papers, which was followed by Robert Bolt's The Tiger and the Horse (1960) and Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover (NY, 1961). At the first Chichester Festival in 1962 he gave an outstanding performance as Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, repeating it the following year during the National Theatre's first season at the Old Vic, where he was also seen as Claudius in Hamlet in 1963, Hobson in Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, and Solness in Ibsen's The Master Builder (both 1964). He took over from Alec Guinness in John Mortimer's A Voyage round My Father in 1972, and was in Simon Gray's Close of Play at the National Theatre in 1979. A fine actor, with a good presence and a superb speaking voice, he was particularly successful in the portrayal of men of intellect and sensibility flawed by emotional turbulence.

His two younger children, Corin (1939– ) and Lynn (1943– ), are also on the stage, the latter being well known in the USA where she now resides.