Everyman as Tragic Hero: Sir Ralph Richardson, 1902-1983

Nature did not cast him to play princes. The watery eyes gave him a look both stoic and startled: in Kenneth Tynan’s phrase, “like a Teddy bear snapped in a bad light by a child holding its first camera.” The body was pear-shaped and the vocal tones were not; they pontificated, or quavered with sentiment. The hands rose and fluttered independently, articulating a sweetly deranged sign language. Ralph Richardson was no matinee idol—no ethereal saint like John Gielgud, whose beautiful voice could coax meaning out of a computer printout; no demon lover like Laurence Olivier, with hellfire in his eyes and the coil of sexual danger. Sir Ralph walked the earth, with sure, heavy strides. When he left it last week at 80, his place was secure in the triple crown of great English actors whose work spanned and illuminated the century.

His forebears were Northumberland farmers, and at first young Ralph dreamed of becoming nothing more eccentric than a pharmacist. Then he saw a production of Hamlet in which the leading actor drew his sword and scraped it against the floor of the stage. This weird and wonderful noise mesmerized the teenager, and he resolved to take to the stage. With no schooling in the dramatic arts, Ralph had literally to buy his way into an amateur repertory company. His audition speech drew this appraisal from the company’s manager: “It’s frightful, Richardson. You could never, never be any good as Falstaff.” The next time Richardson slipped into the grand carcass of that role, in 1945, he was proclaimed the greatest Falstaff in living memory.

He had Falstaff s touch, too, for the imposing phrase of self-deprecation: “Acting,” he said in 1946, “is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.” Like so many luminaries of his generation, he viewed acting as a job from which one should never take a vacation; in 63 years he appeared in more than 180 stage productions, 62 movies and at least a score of TV plays. Through his early years he was the middle-class Everyman, shuffling toward archetype with good will and capacious common sense. But as he aged, his characters turned imperious and, in spite of their power, ineffectual. In David Storey’s Home (1970), John Osborne’s West of Suez (1971) and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975) and in the films The Heiress (1950) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), Richardson found his ideal role: as the haughty burgher whose tragic flaw lies in realizing too late that he is not quite a tragic figure. Though he never played Lear, the Shakespearean role that might have been written for him, Richardson found that doddering majesty as the politician in Storey’s Early Days (1980). Wily but too innocent, flirting with senility, raging at the dying sun of empire, Sir Ralph painted an indelible image of a civilization’s decline.

Offstage, Richardson played another role, no less carefully calculated: the foxy grandpa, cheerfully distant, fond of his drink and his pet ferret named Eddie, ever ready to scoot away on his motorcycle or to celebrate an occasion with his special display of fireworks. As for the pyrotechnics of his craft, he was meticulous in creating them, blending an exhaustive reading of the script with acute observation of Everyman in the street. It was this creature whom Richardson embodied and alchemized into art. In finding something extraordinary in the ordinary man, in revealing his dreams and despair, Sir Ralph proved himself the most fearlessly modern actor of his great generation. Nature had the right idea after all.

SEEKING DIVORCE. Stevie Nicks, 35, rock-‘n’-roll enchantress (Bella Donna, The Wild Heart); and Kim Anderson, 32, record promoter; after eight months of marriage; in Los Angeles. Anderson was formerly married to Nicks’ close friend Robin Anderson, who died of leukemia in 1982 and who had asked the singer to take care of her newborn daughter.

DIED. Joan Hackett, 49, elegant, intense actress best remembered for her first film role, as a neurotic Vassar graduate in The Group (1966), and one of her last, as an aging narcissist in Only When I Laugh (1981); of cancer; in Encino, Calif.

DIED. Robert Docking, 57, Democratic Governor of Kansas who served a record four terms (1967-74), cutting taxes, curtailing state spending and calling out the National Guard and state troopers in 1970 to deal with racial troubles; of emphysema; in Arkansas City, Kans.

DIED. Isidore Zimmerman, 66, a retired doorman who, imprisoned from 1937 to 1962 for a murder he did not commit, was awarded $1 million in damages last May; of a heart attack; in New York City. In 1937 Zimmerman was falsely implicated by one of the killers of a New York police detective and had his death sentence commuted to a life term just hours before he was scheduled to be electrocuted. In 1962 an appellate court ruled that he had been convicted on perjured testimony and that the prosecution had suppressed evidence that would have cleared him. After two decades of lawsuits against New York State, Zimmerman was finally paid damages just 15 weeks before his death.

DIED. Kurt Debus, 74, German scientist who was director from 1952 to 1974 of NASA’S Cape Canaveral facility (now the Kennedy Space Center), overseeing such landmark projects as the launches of the first U.S. manned spaceflight and Apollo 11 ‘s moon mission; of a heart attack; in Cocoa, Fla. Debus worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis’ V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army’s first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear warhead, the Redstone.

DIED. Pat O’Brien, 83, who played Irish cops and priests, soldiers and football coaches in some 80 films; of a heart attack; in Los Angeles. His most memorable performance was as Notre Dame’s famed coach in Knute Rockne, in which he exhorts the team to “go out and win one for the Gipper,” played by Ronald Reagan.

DIED. Wayne Aspinall, 87, crusty Democratic Congressman from Colorado who during twelve terms (1949-72) fought for Western development, dominating the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee for 14 years; of prostate cancer; in Palisade, Colo. Although instrumental in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1965 Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, he drew fire from environmentalists for his multiple-use policies that kept open public lands for mining, grazing, timbering and oil exploration.