Versatile actor with a chameleon-like quality
Ronald Pickup 1940-2021
At school in the mid1950s, Ronald Pickup arched his back, contorted his physique, and gave a pitch-perfect impression of Laurence Olivier in the recently released film version of Richard III, said The Times. Although his schoolmates were far more interested in football than the
Bard, they gave it a rapturous reception. “I got a lot of street cred,” he said. “I thought this is good stuff. I’m going to be an actor and I’m going to work with Laurence Olivier.” A decade later, he did exactly that, when he joined the National Theatre company that Olivier had assembled at The Old Vic. His years there, with such rising stars as Derek Jacobi and Jane Lapotaire, would pave his way for a 50-year career on stage and screen. A tall man, with a long, sensitive face, he was easily recognised – and yet somehow not, said The Daily Telegraph. As one critic noted, Pickup had a chameleon-like quality that “seemed to depend less on painted surfaces than on inner change”.
Ronald Alfred Pickup was born in Chester in 1940, into what he described as a “respectable” middle-class family that was “very average, very secure, very loving”. His mother was a frustrated actress, and there were frequent trips to the theatre, but it was the arrival in the town of a touring Shakespeare company that really inspired him. “It was a strange mixture of straight theatre and circus,” he recalled. “It appealed to me in a very romantic way.” He recited poetry at King’s School, Chester, joined a drama society while studying English literature at Leeds University, and then in 1962, he won a place at Rada, where his contemporaries included Anthony Hopkins.
At The Old Vic, he had lead roles in Richard II and Three Sisters. He was also Rosalind in an all-male production of As You Like It. He got on with Olivier, who once described him as a “brilliant boy”; but after seven years, he started to feel like a “civil servant”, he said, and left. In the following decades, he combined stage work with a wide range of film and TV roles. He was George Orwell in Crystal Spirit; he starred with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in the BBC’s 1987 hit series Fortunes of War, and opposite Judi Dench in Channel 4’s Behaving Badly. More recently, he was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, in The Crown, and Neville Chamberlain in Darkest Hour.
Pickup had married Lans Traverse, an American actress, in 1964; she survives him along with their two children.