English actor Michael Redgrave a tall man with an aristocratic bearing, became a major force in British stage and screen during the mid-twentieth century.
Background
Redgrave was born in Bristol, England on the 20 of March in 1908. Redgrave's parents were both actors. He never knew his father, who left when the boy was six months old to pursue a career in Australia. He died when Redgrave was fourteen. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter. Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
Education
Attending Clifton College until 1927, he then enrolled at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself among his classmates as a poet, editor of the school magazine Venture and contributor of film reviews to the literary magazine Granta. Having a vague idea of one day becoming a writer, after graduating in 1932 he decided to take the prescribed next step for someone who was not independently wealthy.
In 1934 the 25-year-old Cambridge University graduate got a job as a modern-language teacher at England's Cranleigh School.
Having been active in theatre as an undergraduate student–he directed a production of The Battle of the Book in 1930–Redgrave quickly gravitated to Cranleigh's theatre program. Inspired to return to his acting roots when his work with young thespians won him praise, Redgrave left Cranleigh and entered the theatre in the mid-1930.
In 1966, he received an honorary DLitt degree from the University of Bristol.
Career
Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Playhouse in Liverpool on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company.
Offered a job by Tyrone Guthrie, Redgrave made his first professional debut in London at the Old Vic on 14 September 1936, playing Ferdinand in Love's Labours Lost.
At the Embassy Theatre in March 1937, he played Anderson in a mystery play, The Bat, before returning to the Old Vic in April, succeeding Marius Goring as Chorus in Henry V.
Once the London theatres were re-opened, after the outbreak of war, he played:
Captain Macheath in The Beggar's Opera, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, March 1940
Charleston in Thunder Rock, by Robert Ardrey, Neighbourhood Theatre June 1940; Globe Theatre July 1940.
Redgrave joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company at Stratford-upon-Avon and for the 1951 season appeared as Prospero in The Tempest as well as playing Richard II, Hotspur and Chorus in the Cycle of Histories, for which he also directed Henry IV Part Two.
Returning to Britain, in July 1962 he took part in the Chichester Festival Theatre's opening season, playing the title role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya to the Astrov of Laurence Olivier who also directed.
At the Mermaid Theatre in July 1971 he played Mr Jaraby in The Old Boys.
His final work, in 1975, a narrative of the epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem that Redgrave taught as a young schoolmaster and visualised by producer-director Raul da Silva, received six international film festival prizes of which five were first place in category. This work was to be his last before the onslaught of Parkinson's disease.