Michael Pennington in Timon of Athens at the Barbican in 2000. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianView image in fullscreenMichael Pennington in Timon of Athens at the Barbican in 2000. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The GuardianMichael Pennington, Shakespeare and Star Wars actor, dies aged 82‘Brilliant, wise’ co-founder of English Shakespeare Company celebrated for his portrayal of roles including Macbeth and Mercutio
The actor Michael Pennington, known for his Shakespearean work and his role in the original Star Wars trilogy, has died aged 82, his agent has said.
Pennington, who is listed as an honorary associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company, also founded and ran the English Shakespeare Company alongside the theatre director Michael Bogdanov.
His fellow actor Miriam Margolyes remembered him as an “old friend, from Cambridge days, a very fine actor, brilliant, wise, clear”. She said: “I am sad beyond measure,” adding: “Bless your dear memory, old chum.”
Pennington was celebrated for his portrayals of Shakespearean characters, playing Hamlet, Mercutio and Macbeth, as well as King Lear, Richard II and Henry V. He also appeared as Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Angelo, Leontes and Jack Cade across a 60-year career.
He directed Twelfth Night in the UK, Tokyo and Chicago and the Hamlet Project for the National Theatre Bucharest.
View image in fullscreenMichael Pennington as the Death Star commander Moff Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi, 1983. Photograph: Maximum Film/AlamyGiving the 2004 British Academy Shakespeare lecture, Pennington described how he had first developed a fascination with the playwright’s work. “Like trying to establish the moment when one first stood up and walked, it is hard for many of us to remember when Shakespeare first entered our lives; but my own memory is extremely precise. Shakespearean verse hit me like a hammer when I was 11.
“It was Macbeth, rolling off the stage of the Old Vic: ‘My way of life Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’. The yellow leaf? It was the beginning of winter, and this was familiar – it was what I had shuffled through a couple of hours before in our street in north London under the equally yellow streetlamps, on my way home from school.
“I didn’t know what ‘sere’ meant, but I heard its tearing sound, just as even now there are many words in Shakespeare whose weight and power in the theatre are gathered more readily than their meaning. And underneath it, that heavy beat of the verse, this new thing softly pounding.”
Pennington had a long-running association with Bogdanov, who cast him as the lead in Seán O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman in 1980, and in Tolstoy’s Strider: The Story of a Horse, three years later.
A 2017 Guardian obituary of Bogdanov noted that “their impetus in founding the English Shakespeare Company came from a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction at both the RSC and the National”.
Pennington worked with Dame Judi Dench and her husband, Michael Williams, starring in King Lear together in the 1970s, among other productions.
In an interview with the Independent in 2015, Pennington said watching Dench play Ophelia in a 1957 Hamlet production in London had inspired him to go into the theatre. “There’s no one quite like Judi. For her acting is playing: she’s a lass unparalleled.”
Alongside his stage work, Pennington appeared in more than 70 onscreen productions – including the third instalment in the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, as the Death Star commander Moff Jerjerrod. He also starred opposite Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, for which she won her third Academy Award.
Pennington’s agent, Lesley Duff, said: “After a long and wonderful life and career, Michael Pennington died peacefully in the early hours of Thursday 7 May at Denville Hall.”
