Michael Pennington, Shakespeare and Star Wars actor, dies at 82 | Action

Actor Michael Pennington, known for his Shakespearean work and his original role Star Wars trilogy, has died at the age of 82, his agent said.

Pennington, who was listed as an honorary artist by the Royal Shakespeare Company, also founded and ran the English Shakespeare Company alongside the theater director. Michael Bogdanov.

Fellow actor Miriam Margolyes remembered him as “an old friend, from Cambridge days, a very good actor, smart, intelligent, clear”. He said: “I am very sad,” and added: “Bless your dear memory, old chum.”

Pennington was celebrated for his Shakespearean plays, 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 during a 60-year career.

He directed Seventh Night in the UK, Tokyo and Chicago and the Hamlet Project for the National Theater Bucharest.

Delivering the 2004 Shakespeare lecture for the British Academy, Pennington explained how he first became interested in the playwright’s work. “Like trying to establish the time when someone stood up and walked, it is difficult for most of us to remember when Shakespeare entered our lives; but my memory is very accurate.” Shakespeare’s verse hit me like a hammer when I was 11 years old.

“It was Macbeth, coming out on the stage of the Old Vic: ‘My way of life has fallen into darkness, yellow leaf.’ The yellow page? It was early winter, and this was familiar – it was what I had experienced a few hours earlier in our street in north London under the same yellow lights, on my way home from school.

“I didn’t know what the word ‘sere’ meant, but I heard it torn, as indeed even now there are many words in Shakespeare whose weight and power in the theater are gathered more lightly than their meaning.

Pennington had a long relationship with Bogdanov, who cast him as the lead in Seán O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman in 1980, and Tolstoy’s Strider: The Story of Horse, three years later.

A 2017 Guardian profile of Bogdanov stated that “their motivation for founding the English Shakespeare Company came from frustration and dissatisfaction with the RSC and the National”.

Pennington worked with Dame Judi Dench and her husband, Michael Williams, who starred in King Lear in the 1970s, among other things.

In an interview with the Independent in 2015, Pennington said that watching Dench play Ophelia in the 1957 London production of Hamlet inspired her to pursue acting. “There is no one like Judi. For her play is play: she is an incomparable girl.”

Along with his stage work, Pennington has appeared in more than 70 films – including the third installment in the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, as the Death Star commander Moff Jerjerrod. She 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 interesting life, Michael Pennington passed away peacefully in the early hours of Thursday 7 May at Denville Hall.”