Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Antony Sher artist

Antony Sher was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 14 June 1949 to Lithuanian Jewish parents. In 1968 he travelled to London to audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but studied instead at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, followed by a postgraduate course at Manchester University. Primarily known as an actor, Sher was also a noteworthy painter, ambitious in scope and challenging in subject matter, most well-known for self-portraits in his dramatic roles.

Born: 1949 Sea Point, Cape Town, South Africa

Died: 2021 Stratford-upon-Avon, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1968


Biography

Actor, playwright and artist, Antony Sher was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 14 June 1949 to Lithuanian Jewish parents who had escaped the pogroms in Poland (then in Lithuania) in the 1890s. An introverted and quiet child, he enjoyed painting and drawing because they were a solitary activity; concerned by this introspection, his parents sent him to acting classes, which suddenly became his passion. In 1968, at the age of 19, he travelled to London to audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but studied instead at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1969–71, followed by a postgraduate course at Manchester University.

Sher’s initial period in London was not an easy one. As a white South African, he had lived, ‘morally speaking, on the wrong side of apartheid’ (Leith 2009, p. 9). Sher later admitted that he had enjoyed the benefits of apartheid without really thinking about the morality of it, until he came to London in 1968, where he initially hid the fact he was South African, employing his acting abilities to pretend he came from Hampstead. After graduation, he launched his career at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1982. Two years later, he received the Laurence Olivier Award for his performance of Richard III. His many other memorable roles with the company included: Macbeth, Tamburlaine, and King Lear, as well as Cyrano de Bergerac, and Stanley Spencer, for which he won his second Laurence Olivier Award in 1997. In 2000 he was made Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) for services to theatre. Sher also wrote plays, including Primo(2004), a multi-award-winning one-man show adaptation of Primo Levi’s novel of the Holocaust, entitled If This Is A Man.

Primarily known as an actor, Sher was also a noteworthy painter, utilising art as a form of therapy to recover from his cocaine addiction. He also found that art provided another creative outlet, particularly when he was locked into a long and repetitious theatrical run. His paintings were considered as growing in importance from the 2000s, although there were examples of artwork,such as drawings, portraits and caricatures, produced through the 1980s, published in Characters: Paintings, Drawings and Sketches in 1989. Despite his lack of formal training, Sher’s work was ambitious in scope and challenging in subject matter, as demonstrated by his enormous painting The Audience, depicting an eclectic collection of 142 people in the stalls – members of his family along with depictions of Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, Adolf Hitler, Judi Dench, Simon Callow and Shakespeare. The work was the centrepiece and also the name of an exhibition of his paintings, drawings and sculpture held at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry in 2009. All the individuals represented had an impact on Sher’s life, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. In an interview with the Birmingham Post Sher described the painting as a form of ‘autobiography’, reflecting his upbringing as a South African-born Jew, as well as his success as an actor, adding that it ‘came out in a very stream-of-consciousness way’ (Jones 2010, p. 8). Sher prepared a rough cartoon of the painting, which was also exhibited, sticking figures on with Blu-Tack so he could move them around and change their positions, in the artist’s own words, it was ‘like the dinner party from hell, seating 145 people, some whom nobody would want to sit next to’ (Jones 2010, p. 8). Sher’s paintings were also exhibited in the National Theatre, London (1989), the Crucible in Sheffield (2010) and, more recently, at the Royal Shakespeare Company (2018). In addition to portraits, which he described as ‘non flattering’ (Stratford-upon-Avon Herald interview), Sher consistently painted representations of himself portraying characters, upon completion of every theatre production. These self-portraits in dramatic roles included The Fool, Self Portrait, Stratford (from King Lear, 1982) and Richard III, Self Portrait, Stratford (from Richard III, 1984), both Royal Shakespeare Theatre, as well as Self-portrait as Primo (2008, Ben Uri Collection). A gifted writer, he chronicled his life and career in many books, including Beside Myself: An Actor’s Life (2001), Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries (2015) and Year of the Mad King:  The Lear Diaries  (2018). Knighted in 2000, Sher held honorary doctorates from the universities of Liverpool, Warwick and Cape Town. Antony Sher died in died at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England in 2021 after being cared for, during his last months of terminal illness, by his husband Greg Doran, former artistic director of the RSC. In the UK public domain Sher's work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection and Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, while the collection of the V&A in London holds his sketched portrait of playwright, Edward Bond.

Related books

  • Michael Coveney, ‘Sir Antony Sher Obituary’, The Guardian, 3 December 2021, p. 8
  • Antony Sher, Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018)
  • Antony Sher, Year of the Fat Knight: The Falstaff Diaries (London: Nick Hern Books, 2015)
  • ‘The Big Interview: Sir Antony Sher’, The Yorkshire Post, 19 March 2012  
  • Alison Jones, ‘A Different Audience: Actor Sir Antony Sher Took a Year Off to Complete His 'Autobiographical' Painting’, Birmingham Post, 8 April 2010, p. 8 
  • William Leith, ‘Facing Demons: an Exhibition of Paintings by Antony Sher’, Financial Times, 13 June 2009, p. 9 
  • Antony Sher, Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook (New York: Limelight Editions, 2004)
  • Antony Sher, ‘Beside Myself: an Autobiography’ (London: Hutchinson, 2001)
  • Antony Sher, Characters: Paintings, Drawings and Sketches (London: Nick Hearn Books, 1989)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • University of Manchester (student)
  • Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (student)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Mad King/Fat Knight, Royal Shakespeare Company (2018)
  • Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy, Compton Verney, Stratford-upon-Avon (2016)
  • The Audience, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (2010)
  • Characters, National Theatre, London (1989)
  Antony Sher
   
Ben Uri collection

Antony Sher in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Antony Sher]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Antony Sher] in the Ben Uri Library