Kenneth Haigh

Actor who was theatre’s original Angry Young Man

Kenneth Haigh, actor. Born: 25 March 1931, Mexborough, South Yorkshire. Died: 4 February 2018, aged 86

Kenneth Haigh, the English actor whose starring role in the play Look Back in Anger, as well as his own blistering persona, defined the rebellious postwar “angry young man,” has died at 86.

He had reportedly been in a nursing home since 2003, admitted there after he had swallowed a chicken bone in a restaurant and, briefly deprived of oxygen, sustained brain damage.

Haigh, the son of a Yorkshire miner, appeared destined to dig coal himself. For him, he once explained, acting was not so much an aspiration as it was a persistent toothache. “Eventually,” he added, “I gave in and went to the dentist.”

He appeared in a dozen films, including Cleopatra (1963), with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, in which he played Brutus, and A Hard Day’s Night (1964), in which he had a hilarious uncredited cameo role as a cocky television producer interrogating George Harrison.

He was also seen frequently on British and US television, including as a ruthless corporate climber in the early-1970s series Man at the Top and as the British explorer Richard Burton in the 1971 miniseries The Search for the Nile.

But he was most acclaimed for his stage roles – and none more than that of Jimmy Porter, the choleric antihero of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

When Look Back opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956, a publicist for the show popularised the phrase “angry young men” to describe its focus: the disaffected generation that came of age in Britain after the Second World War.

A year later the play opened on Broadway, at the Lyceum Theatre, with a cast that also included Alan Bates and Mary Ure. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times raved that Haigh had delivered “an enormously skillful performance that expresses undertones of despair and frustration and gives the character basis in humanity”.

He was so good in the role – or so thoroughly unlikable as an unfaithful husband whom Osborne had called “a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice” – that, as Haigh told the New York- er in 1958, “some nights I was hissed, and other nights people would clap when my wife left me in the second act”.

At one performance, a woman leap ton stage from the of the theatre and belted him on behalf of aggrieved women everywhere. Publicity over the incident revived the play’s fortunes at the box office, and only later did David Merrick, the producer, admit that he had hired the woman for $250 (nearly 10 times that much in today’s dollars).

Look Back played another 15 months on Broadway and out of town. Though Haigh’s performance was widely acclaimed, Richard Burton got the role in the 1959 film version. Some critics wondered facetiously whether Haigh was actually acting, or simply playing himself. Indeed, he acknowledged that he had a volatile temp era ment.“i was impossible to get on with,” he once recalled. “I either loved or hated people. There was no in-between. And all my ideas were based on a few arbitrary adolescent whims.”

The Guardian recently called Look Back a “gamechanging new play that gave voice to a new generation, disaffected, provincial, working class, alienated by the Sunday newspapers, disgusted by the dreariness and hypocrisy of public life and private behaviour”.

Haigh was born on 25 March 1931 (some sources say 1929), in Mexborough, Yorkshire, to William Haigh, a coal miner, and the former Margaret Glyn, a miner’s daughter. The young Haigh became a staunch socialist. He trained at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art (now the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) in London, where his classmates included the future playwright Harold Pinter. (Haigh later had a role in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Pinter’s “The Collection.”)

He made his stage debut at 17 in Drogheda, Ireland, in 1952, as Cassio in Othello. His first TV appearance was in a 1953 broadcast of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. Haigh first appeared on the London stage in 1954. He had joined the English Stage Company and, over drinks, persuaded Osborne to cast him in Look Back In Anger. “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger,” the critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote.

Haigh occasionally dined with Tynan and another critic, Michael Billington of the Guardian, between his womanising and other offstage transgressions. One night he showed up for supper at Billington’s house. “Same house, same job, same wife,” Haigh said, according to the Guardian. He then wondered, profanely, why Billington hadn’t messed up his life “like the rest of us.”

Haigh played the title role in Albert Camus’ Caligula, directed on Broadway in 1960 by Sidney Lumet. Again the critics wrote raves.

He made his directorial debut at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven with ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore . He later appeared in Robert Lowell’s Prometheus Unbound and Pirandello’s Henry IV at Yale.

At Yale, he met Myrna Stephens, whom he married in 1974. They had a son.

His film career foundered after he starred as Napoleon in Eagle in a Cage (1972), a boxoffice failure. But he continued to play minor roles, including Joan Collins’ accountant in The Bitch (1979).