Thomas More

Paul Scofield died last week.

Don't know how I missed it when it happened. I adore Paul Scofield. Or rather, I adored Paul Scofield. It's enough to make me go put Kenneth Branagh's (stupendous) Henry V on hold at the library. For Scofield played, and played brilliantly, the French king.

On Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout's About Last Night blog (from whence I also gacked the pic of Scofield as Thomas More & Robert Shaw as Henry VIII), Teachout says that he didn't feel the same sense of loss about Scofield's death that he did about the death of British star John Gielgud. He wondered why, but realized that "Scofield made very few movies, and only two of them, Robert Redford's Quiz Show and the 1966 screen version of A Man for All Seasons, are reasonably well known to American audiences."

(Here, we can reasonably well note that I am a complete geek for knowing Henry V better than Quiz Show — though I do know, and know pretty well, all three of the movies heretofore mentioned.)

Teachout also says, "It strikes me as both revealing and ironic that most Americans under the age of sixty — myself, alas, included — will remember Paul Scofield not as one of the greatest stage actors of the twentieth century but as the man who played Charles Van Doren's father in Quiz Show."

The Brits mourn him though, or so says the Telegraph. One paragraph in that article, which recaps his career, his lack of interest in being a star and his 65-year marriage to his wife, makes me hate hate hate Laurence Olivier:
Lord Olivier, who ran the National Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, was said to have been so jealous of Scofield that he repeatedly rejected him for leading roles.

AAAAAAAH.

Anyway. Paul Scofield, it's true, I know you as Sir Thomas More, the French king, Old Hamlet's Ghost, Charles Van Doren's disappointed father. But I fell for your style in high school, and I'm sad that I never got to see you on stage.