James Laurenson, who was primarily a stage actor with good grace, authority and a fine baritone voice, who died at the age of 84 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was a familiar face on television, spanning a brief stint as the Rev. Peter Hope in Coronation Street in 1968 to Sir John Weir, the royal physician, in The Crown (2016).
He had arrived by boat from New Zealand in the early 1960s – as many artists from those islands and Australia did at the time – and in 1964 trod the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and London.
In the late 1960s he joined the touring Prospect Theater Company on their 1969 visit to the Edinburgh Festival, where Ian McKellen became an overnight sensation performing both Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II to perform, a play that was no longer produced professionally at the time. 300 years.
In Edward II, Laurenson played the king’s favorite, Piers Gaveston, who (eventually) meets an untimely end at the hands of a viciously handled, red-hot poker. This was followed by scenes of erotic intensity, culminating in a passionate kiss with McKellen, who regarded the scene as a special bonus for the festival run and an extended season of both plays at the Piccadilly Theater in London, supported by an ecstatically appreciative Harold Hobson in the film . Sunday times. Not much attention was paid to the kiss in the theater (censorship had been abolished in 1968), but it caused a national outcry when the plays were broadcast on television in 1970: the first gay kiss on the box.
In the 1990s, after the breakdown of his first marriage, Laurenson moved from London to Frome, in Somerset, and resumed a happy relationship with the RSC’s founder and director, Sir Peter Hall, who greatly admired his work during Hall’s Indian Summer of Seasons at the Theatre. Royal, Bath.
Among the generous selection of fine performances there I would highlight his wry stoic Vladimir opposite Alan Dobie’s quietly resigned Estragon in Waiting for Godot, one of the best revivals of that landmark play I have ever seen, directed by Hall, who made the first British film had performed. production in 1955; and a delightful hangdog Sir Peter Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s great comedy The School for Scandal, directed by Jamie Lloyd in 2012.
The Beckett happily moved on to the Ambassadors in London, where Laurenson’s biggest and splashiest West End role had been as producer Julian Marsh in Gower Champion’s famous 1983 Broadway version of one of the best backstage films, 42nd Street.
Re-staged a year later at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, by Lucia Victor, Marsh/Laurenson’s two most famous lines didn’t have the Broadway pizz of the original (“Musical comedy – the greatest words in the English language!” is catnip). on Broadway, less so here); and his curse to the suddenly exalted understudy, Peggy Sawyer, “You go out a youngster, but you must come back a star!”, was played with an almost carefully inflected plea in contrast to Jerry Orbach’s gargantuan, Shakespearean command.
But although he had no grounding in musical theater and could not sing very well, Laurenson was praised by Michael Billington for giving “the right impression of a sober-suited Caligula who gradually thaws into a human being”.
He was born in Marton, New Zealand’s North Island, to Amy (née Monk) and her husband, Stanley Laurenson, an agricultural seed seller, and a lay Methodist minister with a penchant for amateur dramatics. James appeared in high school plays in the Marton district before further developing his stage inclinations at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, where he was directed in several productions, including the title role of Macbeth, by the crime novelist Ngaio Marsh; Marsh was in fact the inspiration and founder of professional theater in New Zealand.
The move to Britain was propelled by winning a grant from the New Zealand government to go to Lamda in London for a year. He started at the RSC as a messenger to Henry VI (David Warner as the King) in 1964 and then at Guildenstern – Michael Williams was Rosencrantz – in the groundbreaking Warner Hamlet of 1965.
He was Longaville in John Barton’s excellent 1965 RSC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost and a charming Orlando to Charlotte Cornwell’s Rosalind in a 1977 revival of Trevor Nunn’s As You Like It; the Dauphin and the rabble Jack Cade in the Alan Howard Henry VI trilogy (1978), directed by Terry Hands; and a memorable Cassius – opposite Ben Kingsley’s Brutus – in a 1979 Julius Caesar.
He appeared twice in Hamlet, but not as the prince: he was a lively and disarming Claudius in Jonathan Kent’s Almeida production at the Hackney Empire, with Ralph Fiennes and Francesca Annis in 1995; and a beautiful, unusual double of the Ghost (hypnotic, quietly spoken) and the Player King (who revels in oratorial extravagance) in Nicholas Hytner’s 2010 National Theater production with Rory Kinnear.
Other notable revivals include Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance at the Haymarket in 1997, with Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, in which he and Annette Crosbie superbly played fear-stricken neighbors seeking refuge; and a Donmar Warehouse 2000 revival of Peter Nichols’ Passion Play, a stirring comedy about adultery that entwines two intersecting couples – Laurenson and Cherie Lunghi, and Martin Jarvis and Cheryl Campbell – with a disruptive catalyst, played by Nicola Walker. Michael Grandage’s production confirmed the modern-classic status of a compelling black comedy.
Related: Waiting for Godot, Theater Royal, Bath
Laurenson’s film career was without blockbusters, but after his debut in Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969) he regularly appeared as a minister. He had two decent roles, in Sidney Hayers’ Assault (1971), in which he was a doctor who raped victims who became a prime suspect; and as Bob Geldof’s Pink’s deceased father in Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd – the Wall (1982), who looks back on his unhappy childhood.
Other films included A House in the Hills (1993) with Michael Madsen, the French/British crime film Three Blind Mice (2003) with Edward Furlong and Emilia Fox, Lone Scherfig’s One Day (2011), written based on his own novel by David Nicholls, with Anne Hathaway and Patricia Clarkson, and Scherfig’s The Riot Club (2014), written by Laura Wade – based on her great play Posh, an expose of the Bullingdon private club in Oxford (dishonoured) by David Cameron and Boris Johnson – starring Sam Claflin and Max Irons as students who ultimately answer to their university president, played by an authoritarian killjoy, Laurenson.
It was interesting that Laurenson, a kind and patient man, often excelled at playing villains. One of them was the menacing Friedrich, Elector of Brandenburg, in Heinrich von Kleist’s The Prince of Homburg, directed by Neil Bartlett for the RSC and the Lyric Hammersmith in 2002. You wouldn’t want to encounter him in that mood or mode. However, he had the rare gift of playing ugly in the nicest way possible.
Laurenson married the wonderfully eccentric actor Carol MacReady in 1970. They divorced in 1997, and he subsequently married art teacher Cari Haysom, who survives him along with his son from the first marriage, Jamie, a film producer, and three grandchildren, Nancy. , Connie and Stanley.
• James Philip Laurenson, actor, born February 17, 1940; died April 18, 2024