It’s been a sad week for great British performers. Tony Award-winning classical actor Brian Bedford, renowned for his prolific stage career as well as voicing “Robin Hood–A Fox” in Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 80 from cancer.
Although American audiences might know him best for his performance as the world’s coolest fox, Bedford was also a force to be reckoned with in the theater community, appearing in 18 Broadway productions and performing and directing with Ontario’s renowned Stratford Shakespeare Festival for nearly four decades.
The New York Times writes,
His résumé was vast. His Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, Brutus, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, Shylock, King Leontes, Timon of Athens, Benedick, Ariel and Dogberry. His Chekhov included Astrov in “Uncle Vanya,” Tusenbach in “The Three Sisters” and Trigorin in “The Seagull.”
In more modern roles he was Elyot in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” Vladimir in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” Henry in “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard, Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,” Salieri in Mr. Shaffer’s “Amadeus” and the title character in Simon Gray’s “Butley.”
A student of theater history, Mr. Bedford played not just the roles that the great writers wrote, but also the writers themselves in one-man shows about them.
The Times quotes Bedford as saying, “I’m most alive when I’m acting. I can’t deny it, it’s where I belong.”
(via Jezebel)
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