The Times obituary

He was acclaimed by his peers as the greatest of all Shakespearean actors and yesterday, despite a career that scaled rare peaks, they saluted him as one of the humblest.

Paul Scofield, who has died at the age of 86, never enjoyed a public profile to match his gargantuan talent nor did he seek one.

His agent said that Scofield had died on Wednesday, after a long battle with leukaemia, in a hospital near the West Sussex home where he lived in contented obscurity.

The wider public knew him best as Sir Thomas More, the principled Tudor statesman in A Man for All Seasons, which he played on stage and screen. It won him the Best Actor Oscar in 1967 although he did not turn up to collect it.

The glamour of Hollywood, which helped to make international stars out of his contemporaries Sir Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Sir Alec Guinness, never appealed.

Others may also have recalled, among a sprinkling of parts he took in later life, memorable Bafta-nominated performances as the Chuzzlewit brothers on television in the BBC’s 1994 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.

Scofield was above all an actor’s actor and his colleagues in the profession remembered half a century of mesmerising performances.

Sir Peter Hall, the director who worked with him in the early days of the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the National Theatre in the 1970s, recalled a man “possessed of a unique voice — like a magical oboe — which could range from a subtle beauty in the quiet passages to a voice like thunder when at full volume”.

He added: “He was not in the least interested in being a celebrity and was renowned for declining interviews or any kind of media exposure. For many of us, though, he was — and remained — the finest actor of his generation.”

Nicholas Hytner, the present director of the National Theatre, directed Scofield in his film of The Crucible. He said: “He brought you face to face with the unfathomable. No actor summoned with such authority the mysterious depths of human experience.”

Dame Judi Dench said simply: “He was a great friend and a great man.”

In 2004 a poll of 200 Royal Shakespeare Company actors, including Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Donald Sinden, Sir Antony Sher and Corin Redgrave acclaimed his King Lear of 1962 as the greatest performance in a Shakespeare play. Burton once said: “Of the ten greatest moments in the theatre, eight are Scofield’s.”

Olivier called his whisky-soaked priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory “the best performance I can remember seeing”.

In his private life he avoided the limelight and the party circuit, preferring to walk, ride and cycle near his home in Balcombe, West Sussex. He also savoured the wind and rain in his Scottish island holiday home.

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