Young Shakespearean stage star found later fame on the big screen and TV
Ronald Pickup, who has died aged 80, emerged as a young National Theatre star in the 1960s and appeared in leading Shakespearean roles before moving successfully into film and television, most recently in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel.
Tall and slim, with a long, sensitive face, Pickup possessed chameleon-like qualities which, as one critic noted, seemed to depend less on painted surfaces than on inner change.
Perhaps his most memorable television role was in Melvyn Bragg’s A Time To Dance
(BBC, 1992) when he was cast as an amorous, middle-aged Cumbrian bank manager who has a torrid affair with an
18-year-old played by Dervla
Kirwan. When a rape scene occurred within the first few minutes, nearly 40 viewers complained to the Broadcasting Standards Council.
Among Pickup’s other notable television appearances was that of Guiseppe Verdi in Renato Castellani’s The Life of Verdi (RAI, 1983), a superb portrayal of the Italian composer. In Fortunes of War (BBC, 1988), he brought a ‘‘wonderfully shabby nobility’’ to his role as the appalling Prince Yakimov, a Russo-Irish scavenger and incorrigible drunk.
On the big screen, another memorable role was that of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in the wartime drama Darkest Hour (2017), with Gary Oldman as Churchill.
As a young actor starting out at the National, Pickup was one of Laurence Olivier’s brightest talents. ‘‘Every young actor in the country wanted to be there,’’ explained Olivier’s wife Joan Plowright. Most joined at the humblest level, walking-on and understudying.
Pickup’s name recurred in the lower lines of cast lists among ‘‘courtiers, soldiers, servants etc’’ in Hamlet, Othello or Congreve’s
Love For Love, along with those of Anthony Hopkins, Jane Lapotaire and Michael York, among others.
Pickup’s films included Day of the Jackal
(1972), the Bond movie Never Say Never Again (1983), The Mission (1985) and Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1996). At the age of 71 he played the ladies’ man Norman in the comedy drama The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), which proved to be a surprise box-office hit. He subsequently reprised the role in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in 2015.
Ronald Alfred Pickup was born in Chester, northwest England. After graduating in English from Leeds University, he attended the Rada drama school, and in 1964 was one of 21 senior students chosen to tour Shakespeare in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s birth. Pickup took the title tole in Macbeth and was Adam in
As You Like It. He made his first television appearance, as a physician in Doctor Who, the same year.
Ronald Pickup
actor b June 7, 1940 d February 24, 2021
On his return from America he briefly worked in repertory before moving to the Royal Court (1964-66). He played John Lennon in a stage adaptation of In His Own Write (1968) and appeared alongside Olivier, Alan Bates and Derek Jacobi in a film version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1970) and on stage, again with Olivier, as his sickly son Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into
(1971).
Night
Both also appeared in a subsequent television adaptation of O’Neill’s masterwork. In 1974, Pickup returned to the small screen opposite Lee Remick as her dominating husband Lord Randolph Churchill in the ITV mini-series Jennie.
His later stage roles included that of Lucky opposite Sir Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot (2010) and as Ellie’s father alongside Sir Derek Jacobi in Shaw’s Heartbreak House
(2012).
On television in the early 1980s Pickup played the author of 1984 in Orwell on Jura, Nietzsche in Tony Palmer’s Wagner, appeared in the same director’s Puccini, and was Julius Winterhalter in the television movie Waters Of The Moon. He starred opposite Judi Dench in Channel 4’s drama series Behaving Badly
(1989), and appeared with her the same year, this time on stage, in Sam Mendes’ production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
More recently on television he was Sir Michael Reresby in the sixth series of Downton Abbey, and Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiating at the coronation of Elizabeth II in The Crown.
On radio in 1986 Pickup starred as Tchaikovsky in Derek Kartun’s play The Missing Day, portraying the Russian composer’s suicide from arsenical poisoning after being ‘‘outed’’ as gay. He was cast as Hector opposite Paul Scofield in Andrew Rissik’s King Priam in 1987.
In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by the University of Chester.
With his American wife Lans Traverse, whom he married in 1964, he had a son, Simon, and a daughter, Rachel, who became an actress. –