Guthrie, Sir (William) Tyrone (1900–71), English actor and director, who through his mother Norah Power was the great-grandson of the Irish actor Tyrone
Power. He made his first appearance on the stage under J. B.
Fagan in Oxford in 1924, and directed plays at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, 1929–30, his first London production being
Bridie's The Anatomist (1931). Much of his finest work was in Shakespeare for the
Old Vic. In 1933 he directed an interesting
Measure for Measure with Charles
Laughton as Angelo, repeating it in 1937 with Emlyn
Williams. In 1937 he also directed Laurence
Olivier in
Hamlet, a production later seen at Elsinore; at Christmas 1937 and 1938 he was responsible for delightful productions of
A Midsummer Night's Dream with Robert
Helpmann as Oberon and Mendelssohn's music. Among his other productions were
Hamlet (1938) in modern dress, starring Alec
Guinness, and
Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1944) with Ralph
Richardson. He was Administrator of the Old Vic and
Sadler's Wells theatres, 1939–45. For the
Edinburgh Festivals of 1948 and 1949 he directed
Lyndsay's Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and Allan Ramsay's
The Gentle Shepherd. From 1953 to 1956 he ran the
Stratford (Ontario) Festival theatre, largely his own creation. In 1963 he became Artistic Director of the Minneapolis Theater, later the
Guthrie Theater, contributing his own productions of
Chekhov's Three Sisters and another modern-dress
Hamlet to the first season. His productions there also included
Henry V and
Jonson's Volpone (1964), and
Richard III and Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard (1965). Though no longer Director after 1966 he returned every year to direct until 1969. A creative artist who was not afraid to experiment, Guthrie was at his best in the handling of crowd scenes. He worked in many European countries, including Germany and Finland, and in Israel. In 1967 he returned to the Old Vic to direct the
National Theatre company in
Molière's Tartuffe.
