Nigel Hawthorne
(19**-20**) Actor. Born in Coventry, England, the son of Agnes Rosemary (née Rice) and Charles Barnard Hawthorne, a physician. He grew up in South Africa, where he was educated at St George's Grammar School, Cape Town and Christian Brothers College. He enrolled at the University of Cape Town but withdrew and returned to the United Kingdom in the 1950s to pursue a career in acting.
He made his professional stage debut in 1950, playing Archie Fellows in a Cape Town production of The Shop at Sly Corner. He began his professional career with Brian Brooke. He starred in Leonard Schach’s Cockpit Players production of Basil Warner’s Try for White, which opened in 1959 at the Pretoria Opera House before moving to the Intimate Theatre for the remainder of their highly successful run. It also starred Marjorie Gordon, Zoe Randall, Michael Turner. Joyce Grant and Fiona Fraser replaced Minna Millsten and Heather Lloyd-Jones respectively, from the Cape Town cast. He starred in Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Intimate Theatre for the Cockpit Players, together with John McKelvey, Joan Blake and Leon Gluckman in 1959. He starred in Thornton Wilder’s lively period-New York comedy, The Matchmaker, which was staged by the Cockpit Player’s in 1959. He played in the Cockpit Players productions of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker and Paddy Chayefsky’s prizewinning The Tenth Man at the Playhouse in 1961 with actors Michael McGovern and Siegfried Mynhardt. He left South Africa permanently for London in 1962, where he had a long, varied and successful career. He began with an advert for Mackeson stout and a bit part in Dad's Army, then went on to one of his most famous roles as Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Permanent Secretary of the fictional Department of Administrative Affairs in the television series Yes Minister (and Cabinet Secretary in its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister), for which he won four BAFTA awards, and as King George III in Alan Bennett's stage play The Madness of George III (Olivier Award) and the film version entitled The Madness of King George, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Hawthorne was also a voice actor, and lent his voice to two Disney films. In 1985, he voiced Fflewddur Fflam in The Black Cauldron, and in 1999, he voiced Professor Porter in Tarzan.
He returned briefly to South Africa in 1995, to make the film Inside with director Arthur Penn on his return.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987, and was knighted in 1999. His autobiography Straight Face appeared in 2002.
Sources
On South African period see Schach, 19**, Tucker, 1997
See further Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Hawthorne
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