A GREAT LOSS FOR STRATFORD
The Stratford Festival lost two of its legendary actors this week — festival superstar Brian Bedford, who has died at the age of 80, and longtime company member William (Bill) Needles, who died at the age of 97.
Both lives will be celebrated in the days to come. And both should be remembered as symbols of why the festival remains an internationally renowned institution that draws visitors from around the globe.
Both men represented key elements fuelling Stratford’s remarkable 63-year-old history. One is the strength it has always drawn from continuity of tradition. The other is the way in which its past and present continue to nurture each other.
Brian Bedford first attracted attention in his native England as star of playwright Peter Shaffer’s initial stage success, Five Finger Exercise. That play was directed by the great John Gielgud, who became friend and mentor to the young actor.
Bedford moved to North America, where a starring role in the film Grand Prix hinted at the possibility of a Hollywood career. But although he continued to do occasional film and TV work throughout his career — including the voice of Robin Hood in the Disney animated movie and playing J. Edgar Hoover’s longtime companion in Oliver Stone’s JFK — his real love was the stage, and in particular classical theatre.
Bedford was already making his mark on Broadway by the time he arrived at the Stratford Festival in 1975, the same year that new artistic director Robin Phillips was mounting a stunning debut season. Bedford’s work in two Shakespearean roles — an hilarious Malvolio in Twelfth Night and a diabolical Angelo in Phillips’s groundbreaking production of Measure For Measure — won international acclaim.
He remained a festival fixture for 27 seasons over three decades — excelling not only in the demanding classical roles (King Lear, Richard lll) but also showing a remarkable gift for comedy. His partnership with fellow company member Maggie Smith became legendary after they appeared together in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.
Bedford was always clear about what the Stratford Festival meant to him. “It’s made my life,” he told the CBC a few months ago. He made the same point in an interview with Postmedia in the summer of 2013 when he was planning to return to the stage after treatment for cancer.
He had already been well enough that year to don his director’s hat and mount a wellreceived production of Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Bedford, who had known Coward and understood the particular demands of his comedy, was happy and reflective about the show’s success. He talked about the excitement of working with younger company members, of the rewards of bringing decades of his own personal experience to rehearsals, and of the value to him as a seasoned veteran of being stimulated by new talent. It was a matter of different generations nurturing each other.
In that interview, Bedford also talked eloquently about his planned late-summer return to his beloved Festival Theatre stage as Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice. That performance never happened, and the interview was never written because only a few days afterwards, illness forced Bedford to drop out. He never acted again.
Bedford’s legacy to the festival is immense. But so is his indebtedness to the institution that gave him wings to fly and to those who came before him.
Needles was already a seasoned company member when Bedford came to Stratford in 1975. They were to work together on stage, and in later years Bedford was to talk gratefully of the joy of being accepted into a circle that already embodied a powerful tradition.
Needles plowed a more humble furrow than his illustrious colleague. In 1954, founding artistic director Tyrone Guthrie cast him as Petruchio in a Wild West version of The Taming Of The Shrew, and he remained a loyal, indispensable and gifted member of the acting company until his retirement a decade ago at the age of 87. And even after leaving the stage, he continued to wheel his way on his scooter to the Festival Theatre and join generations of colleagues in the green room.
He was the oldest working actor in Canada when he retired. Now his death has severed one of the few remaining links with the festival’s beginning — having been a member of its very first acting company in 1953 and having acted on its boards for a remarkable 47 seasons.