Heathcote Williams; British playwright

Heathcote Williams, a British playwright, poet, anarchist and magician who — in addition to founding a secessionist state with a group of London squatters — wrote one of the most acclaimed plays of the 1970s, along with best-selling poems about dolphins and whales, died July 1 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was 75.

The cause was emphysema, said a daughter, Lily Williams.

Williams, a reedy Oxford University dropout who for many years sported black combat boots and a mass of curly red hair, emerged from Britain's 1960s counterculture movement as a sort of artistic Prospero, a gifted but mischievous writer whose creative talents recalled those of Shakespeare's sorcerer in "The Tempest."

He wrote a dozen plays, many of them critical of society's increasing obsession with celebrity; published several scholarly book-length poems on endangered animals; and co-founded an anarchist publishing house, Open Head Press, that skewered Britain's royal family in pornographic postcards and scurrilous pamphlets.

Williams also appeared in more than a dozen film and television roles, including as Prospero in Derek Jarman's 1979 adaptation of "The Tempest," and helped start the "sex paper" Suck, an underground Amsterdam publication at the fore of Europe's sexual liberation movement.

He performed as a firebreather (at one point accidentally setting himself on fire), practiced conjuring tricks, contributed to a television show about Charles Dickens' love of magic, and struck up a relationship with Jean Shrimpton, the '60s supermodel who helped popularize the miniskirt.