Wanamaker, Sam

Wanamaker, Sam (1919–93), American actor and director, who studied for the stage at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where in 1964 he returned to play Macbeth, and made his first appearance in New York in 1942. After serving with the US armed forces he returned to the stage in 1946 in Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine. He made his first appearance in London in 1952 as Bernie Dodd in Odets's Winter Journey, which he also directed, and then remained in England, directing and acting in a number of plays, including Odets's The Big Knife (1954) and N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker (1956). In 1959 he was with the company at Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Iago to the Othello of Paul Robeson.

He directed several plays in America in the early 1960s, but his work in the theatre has since been concentrated on his efforts to rebuild Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on Bankside near the original site. In the early 1970s he founded a Trust for this purpose, and a temporary theatre tent opened in 1972 for a summer season which included a modern-dress production of Hamlet with Keith Michell. The second season, in which Vanessa Redgrave played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, came to an abrupt end when the tent collapsed in a storm. A second temporary theatre of tabular steel opened in 1975, and three summer seasons were given there. After lengthy legal wrangles a permanent theatre is scheduled to open in 1992. The site will also contain a small covered theatre (based on an Inigo Jones design) and a new museum, the whole complex, the International Shakespeare Globe Centre, forming a centre for Shakespearian studies. The nearby Shakespeare Globe Museum, originally called the Bear Gardens Museum, was founded by Wanamaker in 1972 and covers the English theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries.