Michael Hordern

Sir Michael Hordern
Michael Hordern in Khartoum
Born	4 October 1911(1911-10-04) Berkhamsted, England
Died	2 May 1995 (aged 83) Oxford, England
Occupation	Actor, Radio personality
Years active	1937–1994
Spouse(s)	Eve Mortimer (1943-1986) (her death) 1 child

Sir Michael Murray Hordern (4 October 1911 – 2 May 1995) was an English actor, knighted in 1983 for his services to the theatre.

Early life

Hordern was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and educated at Brighton College, as was his brother Peter. He acted at school and then as an amateur with the St. Pancras People's Theatre. He worked as a school teacher and travelling salesman before entering the profession. In 1937, he made his professional stage début at the People's Palace, east London, playing a minor role in Othello, and later in the year joined the repertory company of the Little Theatre in Bristol. There he met the actress Grace Eveline Mortimer; they married in 1943, and remained together until her death in 1986.^[1] They had one daughter, Joanna.

On stage

His stage work, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and in London, at the Old Vic and in the West End demonstrated his wide range and rich, expressive voice. In addition to his many Shakespearean roles (Jaques in As You Like It, Cassius in Julius Caesar, Polonius in Hamlet, Malvolio in 'Twelfth Night), Hordern performed in plays by Strindberg, Chekhov, Ibsen, Pinero, Pinter, Dürrenmatt, Albee, Alan Ayckbourn, David Mercer and Tom Stoppard.

Perhaps his greatest performances on stage was as King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller, at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1970. He performed the role for Miller on two further occasions, in 1975 and in the BBC Television Shakespeare series in 1982, undoubtedly one of the high points of that series. In 1978 he returned to Stratford to play a wise Prospero in The Tempest, equally admired. This was also replicated for the BBC Shakespeare series in 1980.

Film, television and radio

Michael Hordern as Sir Thomas Boleyn in Anne of a Thousand Days

He made more than a hundred and sixty film appearances, usually in character roles, including Passport to Pimlico (1949), Scrooge (1951, as Jacob Marley; he was to play Ebenezer Scrooge himself in a 1977 TV adaptation), The Heart of the Matter (1953), Grand National Night (1953),The Spanish Gardener (1956), Sink the Bismarck! (1960), El Cid (1961), Cleopatra (1963), The V.I.P.s (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Khartoum (1966), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Where Eagles Dare (1969), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), England Made Me (1972), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Juggernaut (1974), The Slipper and the Rose (1976), Shogun (1980), Gandhi (1982). In 1968 he appeared as the central character in Jonathan Miller's television adaptation of M. R. James' ghost story, Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad and, perhaps coincidentally, some years later narrated nineteen unabridged supernatural stories by M. R. James, released across four audio cassette collections by Argo Records in the 1980s. In 1986, he appeared in the TV series Paradise Postponed. In 1992 Hordern narrated the two-cassette recording of the John Mortimer story Rumpole on Trial.

Hordern was also in demand for other voice-over work. As the narrator of FilmFair Production's Paddington, and as the voice of Badger in the 1980s TV series The Wind in the Willows, Hordern is familiar to TV audiences everywhere. He also provided the ironic voice-over narration in Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, and can be heard playing the part of the rabbits' god Frith in Martin Rosen's 1978 animated adaptation of Richard Adams' Watership Down [1].

On radio he played Gandalf in the BBC's radio adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1981); another great wizard, Merlin, in an adaptation of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone (1982); and P. G. Wodehouse's famous indefatigable valet (or gentleman's gentleman) Jeeves in several series in the 1970s.

Hordern's abridged 1991 readings of C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia remains a classic recording of the series.

Later years

On television, he played Tartuffe for the BBC in 1971 and Professor Marvin in The History Man in 1980. He also appeared in several classic drama serials, one of his last performances being in Middlemarch (1994).

In 1956 he had bought a house near Newbury in Berkshire, where he spent his final years close to the river Lambourn on which he had enjoyed fishing (for trout and grayling) for so long, where dramatist Tom Stoppard "shared a rod" with him, as Stoppard once put it.

His final television appearance was in the BBC adaptation of MIddlemarch in 1994.

Shortly before his death from a kidney disease, Brighton College named a room in his honour where a bronze portrait bust stands; the National Portrait Gallery in London has another copy.

Partial filmography

• The Years Between (1946)
• School for Secrets (1946)
• A Girl in a Million (1948)
• Night Beat (1947)
• The Small Voice (1947)
• Third Time Lucky (1948)
• Portrait from Life (1948)
• Good-Time Girl (1948)
• Passport to Pimlico (1949)
• Train of Events (1949)
• The Magic Box (1951)
• Scrooge (1951)
• Tom Brown's Schooldays (1951)
• The Card (1952)
• The Beachcomber (1954
• Forbidden Cargo (1954)
• Storm Over the Nile (1955)
• The Dark Avenger (1955)
• The Constant Husband (1955)
• The Night My Number Came Up (1955)
• Alexander the Great (1956)
• The Man Who Never Was (1956)
• Pacific Destiny (1956)
• Sink the Bismark (1960)
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)
• Where Eagles Dare (1969)
• Up Pompeii (1971)
• Royal Flash (1975)
• The Medusa Touch (1978)
• The Missionary (1982)

References

External links

• Michael Hordern at Find a Grave
• Michael Hordern at the Internet Movie Database
• Actor's Compendium

Bibliography

• Robin Armstrong, The Painted Stream, Dent, 1985, ISBN 0-460-04702-7 (foreword by Hordern)