I have never forgotten my first sighting of David Warner, who has died aged 80. As a teenager in Leamington Spa in the late 1950s, I used to haunt the bookshop in a local department store, Burgis and Colbourne, where serving behind the counter was a lanky, straw-haired guy in an ill-fitting Dickensian suit. I had no idea who he was, until, in 1963, I saw him on the Stratford stage playing Trinculo, Cinna the Poet and, eventually, Henry VI. The eccentric-looking bookseller was, I suddenly realised, a potentially great actor.
Warner’s stage career falls into two distinct halves: a youthful decade of riotous acclaim and a late-life flowering separated by a period from 1972 to 2001 when he forsook the stage to carve out a career in cinema. Yet in both youth and age he showed similar gifts: an innate gentleness of spirit, a sense of latent melancholy, an inquisitive intellect. Drawn together in later years by our shared Midlands background, I discovered that the qualities that informed his acting were also an essential part of his character.
Warner seemed to have parachuted on to Parnassus in that, at the age of 22, he became famous overnight for his Henry VI in the great Peter Hall-John Barton RSC production of The Wars of the Roses. As always, the truth was a bit more complicated in that Warner had already made his mark as one of the fruit-pickers in an RSC production of David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come (affectionately dubbed by the cast The Pear-Taker). But there is no doubt that his Henry VI was a stunning performance. Partnered by Peggy Ashcroft as his baleful queen and surrounded by sword-brandishing lords, Warner seemed a saintly, almost Dostoevskian figure adrift in a world of brutal realpolitik. “When he is murdered by Richard of York,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, “he accepts the blade not only with forgiveness but with a kind of wry affection for his assassin. I have seen nothing more Christlike in modern theatre.”
It was a performance that made Warner an integral part of the RSC in its formative years. In a complete Shakespeare history cycle in 1964, he went on to play Richard II and Mouldy in Henry IV Part Two as well as repeating his Henry VI. Almost inevitably the next year he was Hamlet in a Hall production. With his angular presence, his ruffled hair and a rust-red muffler about his neck, he seemed to embody the alienation and anti-establishment rebelliousness of 1960s youth who flocked to his performance. As Tony Church, who played Polonius, remarked, “They recognised themselves in David. He was one of them and they felt he was a hero speaking to them.”
Driving past the site of Avoncliffe, where Hall lived at the time, Warner once told me that he took up residence in the Hall household during rehearsals to saturate himself in the part. But, although film companies quickly came calling, leading to an astonishing performance as the mooncalf-hero of Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment, Warner continued to work in theatre: he was a reclusive Labour MP who spends his days growing pot in David Hare’s The Great Exhibition and the stammering Roman emperor in John Mortimer’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.
Ultimately, however, the movies claimed him and for three decades Warner was one of the finest actors not on the English stage. He returned in 2001 to play Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s Major Barbara in New York and, instead of the usual bombastic tycoon, offered an unexpectedly moving portrayal of a man driven by profound love for his daughter. In 2005 he was at Chichester playing King Lear in a Steven Pimlott production and, although I complained that he lacked Lear’s intemperate fury, few actors have been better in the final scenes: when Cordelia, in captivity, asked him if they would see her victorious sisters, Warner replied “No, no, no, no” with unforgettable determination.
Having made his name with the RSC in The Wars of the Roses, it seemed fitting that his last notable stage performance should be as Falstaff in Michael Boyd’s 2007 History cycle: he was especially brilliant in Henry IV, Part Two where he gave us a Falstaff aware of life’s lengthening shadows and approaching his inevitable end with all the dignity he could muster. I leave others to judge Warner’s film work but in the theatre he embodied a spirituality, natural grace and an exquisite sadness that will be much missed.
