Talk:Nicol Williamson

Biography assessment rating comment

WikiProject Biography Summer 2007 Assessment Drive

The article may be improved by following the WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article. -- Yamara 23:44, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Deleting inappropriate material

Removing from the trivia section the vague "non-citation" regarding the source of the statement needing verification (a correct citation would specify the title, publication or release date and other pertinent info regarding the commentary, as well as where within the commentary the source statement occurs, and remove the bloody "citation needed" when you add the citation info — duh), and the irrelevant crap about aluminium beanies as the cited webpage says nothing about the practice being in any way based upon or influenced by Williamson's costume in Excalibur. Canonblack 03:26, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Gunner in Airborne Division

Airborne division of what? The Andorran 2nd Mountain Marine Expeditionary Corps? Needs to specify otherwise the information is confusing at best, meaningless at worst. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.169.171.232 (talk) 21:35, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Self-evidently it means the British Army. It's what Michael Coveney says in the DNB article, but it's incorrect, since the army had no airborne divisions by the time Williamson did his National Service in the 1950s. (The wartime 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions disbanded in 1945 and 1948 respectively.) He was presumably a gunner with the airborne or air-mobile brigade formed around the Parachute Regiment. At the time, that would be 16th Independent Parachute Brigade Group, whose artillery component was 33rd Parachute Field Regiment RA. The slight or not so slight snag with that arrangement was that 33rd PFR was armed with 25-pounders, which could only be air-dropped by US C-119 aircraft; no other type could carry the necessary 'medium-stressed platform' for parachuting such a load. This would be all right in a NATO operation, but at Suez, without American co-operation, the men of 3 Para had to jump without artillery and relied on the Navy for fire support. https://www.paradata.org.uk/article/16-para-brigades-air-contact-teams Williamson seems to have done his two years' National Service after Suez, in 1956-8. The army still maintains a 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team, the 1 and the 6 commemorating the wartime airborne divisions. (This is all assuming that when Coveney says 'gunner' he does actually mean an artilleryman and not, for instance, a Bren gunner in the Parachute Regiment itself; also assuming Coveney is correct in saying Williamson was with the airborne forces. If he really was in the airborne artillery he would have been jump-trained and entitled to wear the red beret. This would perhaps fit with his well-known combative temperament.) Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:09, 23 April 2022 (UTC)

ODNB

Williamson's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is now online via subscription (it, among other things, confirms his birth year). Here's a transcript:

Williamson, (Thomas) Nicol (1936–2011), actor, was born on 14 September 1936 at Beckford Lodge maternity hospital, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, the son of Hugh Williamson, a metallurgist and sometime hairdresser's assistant, and his wife, Mary Brown Hill, née Storrie. (He later gave the year of his birth in Who's Who and elsewhere as 1938.) At the time of his birth registration his parents lived at 192 Quarry Street, Hamilton, but the family moved to Birmingham before the Second World War and Williamson attended the Central Grammar School there between 1947 and 1953 and appeared locally in amateur theatre. He trained at the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama (1953–6), and spent two years doing his national service as a gunner in an airborne division. He returned to Scotland to play two seasons at the Dundee Repertory Theatre in 1960, appearing in thirty-three productions, most of them directed by Anthony Page, in a remarkable company that included Glenda Jackson, Edward Fox, Prunella Scales, and Brian Cox.

Williamson made his London début in 1961 in That's Us by Henry Chapman at the Royal Court Theatre, where the English Stage Company, formed by George Devine and Tony Richardson in 1956, had changed the course of British theatre, and Williamson, consistently championed by Anthony Page, was soon recognized as the most electrifying of the new actors, with a brooding, damaged, heroic quality about him. Tall and willowy, red-haired, and with a curling lip and a ferocious snarl, he was also possessed of an extraordinary stillness on the stage. In Shakespearean terms, no actor of his day embodied better the ‘lean and hungry look’ of Cassius or Ellen Terry's description of Henry Irving's Macbeth as ‘a great famish'd wolf’.

After a brief excursion with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1962 (when he appeared in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths and Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women), these qualities convinced John Osborne, prompted by Page, to cast Williamson, in 1964, in possibly his greatest role, that of the disintegrating, scabrous, and voluble solicitor Bill Maitland in Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence. He was twenty years too young for the role but it didn't matter (he returned to it, in triumph, on the same Royal Court stage in 1978), just as he was perhaps slightly too old for Hamlet when he played that role five years later, directed by Tony Richardson, in London and New York. In between these pinnacles, he played a superb Vladimir in the first major revival of Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court in 1964 (Page again directing) and made the first of his major films, Jack Gold's The Bofors Gun (1968), in which he played a demented and dangerous Irish corporal; compelling film versions of Inadmissible Evidence (1968) and Hamlet (1969) followed.

Osborne hailed Williamson as ‘the greatest actor since Marlon Brando’ (http://www.nicolwilliamson.com), and his Hamlet became as much discussed and admired as Richard Burton's had been in 1953 and David Warner's in 1965. Harold Wilson, the prime minister, recommended the performance to the American president, Richard Nixon, who invited the actor to perform a solo show (with jazz musicians) at the White House in 1970. He took his place in the modern pantheon, but also became renowned for his hell-raising and temperamental outbursts, onstage and off; he could, and did, play Hamlet on a couple of bottles of wine, said his Horatio, Michael Pennington; but he also cancelled performances, even walked off the stage mid-flow, and once slugged a Broadway producer, David Merrick, backstage during an argument.

In 1971 Williamson married the American actress Jill Townsend (b. 1945), who had played his daughter in the Broadway production of Inadmissible Evidence; then made a remarkable but creakily old-fashioned BBC film of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, playing the Chicago gangster as an elongated version of Adolf Hitler with a square postage stamp of a black moustache, heavily slicked back shiny hair, and a tangy Brooklyn accent. He rejoined the Royal Shakespeare Company for the 1973 Stratford upon Avon season, playing a coruscating, full-on full-on misanthropic Coriolanus and a moody, self-loathing Macbeth—two roles that suited him perfectly—in productions by Trevor Nunn, and in 1975 appeared in the title role, and directed his wife, Jill, in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the small Other Place in Stratford.

Williamson was an enthusiastic jazz singer, never happier than when jamming with musician friends in private, or in clubs. But his one foray into musical theatre, Rex (1976), by an ageing Richard Rodgers, with book and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and Sherman Yellen, was a disaster; Williamson was praised for his tenacious turn as Henry VIII but Clive Barnes of the New York Times said that the show had ‘almost everything not going for it’ (New York Times, 26 April 1976) and it closed after just forty-nine performances. Notable film roles in this period included Sherlock Holmes in Herbert Ross's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976; a title referring to the sleuth's preferred mixture of cocaine), the double agent Maurice Castle in Otto Preminger's The Human Factor (1979; Graham Greene's novel was adapted by Tom Stoppard), and a mighty Merlin in John Boorman's highly entertaining Arthurian action fantasy, Excalibur (1981).

Always a maverick, Williamson spent the latter part of his life in Greece and (mostly) Amsterdam, with odd sightings in north London pubs. He became increasingly obsessed with early twentieth-century American actor John Barrymore, whom he played in Paul Rudnick's 1991 Broadway play, I Hate Hamlet (injuring one of the cast in an onstage sword fight and alienating the rest of them), and in his own bizarre one-man show Jack: a Night on the Town with John Barrymore, which he played to intrigued and mostly disappointed audiences in London, Los Angeles, and New York between 1994 and 1996. He finally played King Lear for the former Royal Shakespeare Company director Terry Hands in the remote Theatr Clwyd in Mold, Flintshire, in 2001, an extraordinary but irresistible and often glinting and deeply affecting performance, with some of the lines and even whole speeches misplaced; it didn't matter. The second night's performance was cancelled in order to allow the first night party to run its course.

Williamson died in Hoorn, near Amsterdam, of oesophageal cancer on 16 December 2011, having been diagnosed with the disease two years previously. His son, Luke, announced his passing almost six weeks later because, he said, his father did not want anyone to know he had been ill; he remained an intensely private man to the end. His marriage to Jill Townsend was dissolved in 1977.

Michael Coveney

Sources

K. Tynan, The sound of two hands clapping (1975) · R. Findlater, ed., At the Royal Court (1981) · W. G. Hyland, Richard Rodgers (1998) · The Times (25 Jan 2012); (26 Jan 2012); (31 Jan 2012); (2 Feb 2012); (11 Feb 2012) · Daily Telegraph (25 Jan 2012) · The Independent (26 Jan 2012) · The Herald [Glasgow] (26 Jan 2012) · New York Times (26 Jan 2012) · The Guardian (27 Jan 2012); (31 Jan 2012) · www.nicolwilliamson.com, accessed on 15 July 2014 · WW (2011) · b. cert.

Crisso (talk) 22:15, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Birth Year

1936 is solidly sourced in the article by The New York Times and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (a highly regarded UK publication which cites Williamson's birth certificate as a primary source - see above). Many other reliable sources also indicate he was born in 1936, these inclue obituaries in the Herald Scotland, The Financial Times, The Stage, The Daily Telegraph and on the BBC. Crisso (talk) 12:47, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

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