Actor Who Earned Acclaim for His Performances of Shakespeare, Befriended Judi Dench and Recited Poetry with Grace Kelly

2014/12/2 Richard Pasco | The Times

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Richard Pasco

Pasco as Richard II SOPHIE BAKER/Arena PAL.

Published at 12:01AM, December 2 2014

Actor who earned acclaim for his performances of Shakespeare, befriended Judi Dench and recited poetry with Grace Kelly

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1973 production of Richard II ranks among the greatest productions of the play by that company or any other. Much of this was down to the vision of director John Barton, but equally crucial were the powers of the actors Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco.

The pair alternated the parts of Richard and his rival Bolingbroke, starting each performance by appearing onstage to be assigned their role by an actor dressed as Shakespeare, who would place a crown on one of their heads. For Pasco — who played the king as a sturdy and not very sensitive optimist, rather than the usual romantic melancholic, and Bolingbroke as an extrovert hardened by experience — it was his finest hour. That same year, he gave another classic performance as Jaques in As You Like It, also at Stratford, depicting the character as a playboy gone to seed. The critic Benedict Nightingale wrote of this “unkempt, glazed creature http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article4284340.ece 1/3 2014/12/2 Richard Pasco | The Times in a white suit, a rundown dandy, blinking through his specs at the light, half staggering and half loping across the stage . . . twitching and sneering as he stammered over the word ‘p pleasure’.” For many he stole the stage from Rosalind, played by Eileen Atkins.

Unlike Shakespeareans such as Ben Kingsley, Pasco chose not to focus on film, though he slummed it in Hammer melodramas including The Gorgon in 1964. On the small screen, too, he had a sporadic career, although one role in a 1960 BBC production of Jean Anouilh’s Colombe gave him the unusual distinction of sharing the first maletomale kiss on television with Sean Connery. That the future James Bond was playing a jealous brother wanting to see if Pasco’s character was a good kisser did little to reduce the sensation.

He formed a more lasting bond with another future Bond star, Judi Dench. She was already a friend of his second wife, the actress Barbara LeighHunt, when he was brought in at the last minute to play Orsino in an RSC tour of Twelfth Night in Australia. The original actor in the part, Charles Thomas, had killed himself (reportedly over his unrequited love for Dench), and a bond was formed between the two new leads. Pasco learnt the role in three days, but it was said he refused to wear the dead actor’s costume. Many years later Dench personally requested that he take the part of Dr Jenner in the 1997 film Mrs Brown in which she played Queen Victoria. “We will all have such fun in Scotland,” she told Pasco.

His other great passion — poetry — brought him together with Grace Kelly. At the 1976 Edinburgh Festival, he and Princess Grace of Monaco (as she then was) gave a recital of American verse to celebrate the US bicentennial. Press interest was intense and the event was such a success that the pair teamed up again in 1980 for Birds, Beasts and Flowers, a programme of poetry and music that included Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Pied Beauty and Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.

Though he brought distinction to modern roles, verse — and Shakespeare in particular — gave full rein to his rich voice and wide tonal range. For him the monologue was a natural home. Terry Hands, the former artistic director of the RSC, said: “His was a golden voice.” He also had a talent for comedy. Adrian Noble, who directed Pasco as Schastlivstev in Ostrovsky’s The Forest, remembered his good humour both on and off stage. When Pasco and his fellow cast members were not practising their lines, they were enjoying “hilarious lunches in the local greasy spoon café which boasted a Rennies machine on the wall”.

Richard Edward Pasco was born in Barnes, London, in 1926. His parents, Cecil and Phyllis, sent him to King’s College, Wimbledon, but he left at 16 to become an apprentice stage manager and bitpart player at the nearby Q Theatre, close to Kew Bridge. Studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama, he won the Gold Medal and then, after National Service, joined the Old Vic Company in 1950.

He continued his training with the Birmingham Rep and the English Stage Company, where in 1956 he took the lead in a revival of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger at the Lyric Hammersmith. The following year he was Frank Rice, son of Laurence Olivier’s Archie, in the first run of Osborne’s new play The Entertainer at London’s Royal Court. Despite Osborne’s forbidding reputation, Pasco befriended him.

He was married first to the actress Greta Watson, with whom he had his only child: William now works for the BBC. After their marriage was dissolved in 1964, Pasco moved to the Bristol Old Vic. There he met LeighHunt, who was memorable in Hitchcock’s Frenzy and as Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the 1996 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. They married in 1967 and worked together often, notably in a long West End run of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article4284340.ece 2/3 2014/12/2 Richard Pasco | The Times By the time Pasco left the Bristol Old Vic for the RSC in 1969 he was a distinguished stage presence. He was appointed CBE eight years later.

When he moved to the National he won plaudits in David Hare’s stateofthenation trilogy, particularly for his performance as an imperious bishop in Racing Demon. He was reluctant to return to television but nevertheless took on lead roles in period dramas such as Sorrell and Son.

Pasco and LeighHunt always remained close to the RSC. In his book Him & Me, Pasco’s agent Michael Whitehall recalled a 1996 visit to “Dickie and Bar, as everyone called them”. At that time he had three children under the age of eight — including the future comedian Jack Whitehall — and he found their house “in no way a childfriendly place”. Pasco and his wife were avid collectors, filling their cottage in Stratford “with books, leatherbound first editions down to rare theatrical folios, fine china, bronzes, paintings large, small and very small.. .”

Surprisingly, the only breakage that occurred during that visit was inflicted by Pasco, who managed to drop the Whitehall family’s newly purchased video camera. Jack promptly turned to his father and said: “Well Daddy, we didn’t knock anything over.”

Despite Pasco’s kind and exceptionally gentle nature, he enjoyed success in an otherwise ruthless industry. He made his final appearance for the RSC on the night before the Royal Shakespeare Theatre closed for redevelopment in 2007. The hushed audience listened as he delivered Jaques’s Seven Ages of Man speech one last time.

Richard Pasco, CBE, actor, was born on July 18, 1926. He died on November 12, 2014, aged 88

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