British stage and film actor Paul Scofield, who won a Tony Award and later an Oscar for his portrayal of Sir Thomas More in
A Man For All Seasons, died of leukemia on March 19 at a hospital near his home in Sussex. He was 86.
Scofield was born January 21, 1922, son of the schoolmaster in a village near the south coast of England. He trained at the Croydon Repertory Theater School and London's Mask Theater School before World War II. Barred from military service for medical reasons, he entertained the troops and acted in classic plays in London and Stratford. Scofield met his wife, Joy Parker, when he was playing Horatio and she was portraying Ophelia in a touring company of Hamlet 1942. The couple married in 1943 and had two children, Martin and Sarah.
Among the highlights of Scofield's stage career was his collaboration with Peter Brook on an adaptation of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory in 1956, which Sir John Gielgud regarded as the younger actor's greatest performance. Scofield starred on the London stage as Salieri in Amadeus in 1979 and in later years in Heartbreak House and John Gabriel Borkman. But his greatest success came in A Man for All Seasons, which began on the London stage, earned Scofield a Best Actor Tony Award in 1962 in his only Broadway appearance, and an Academy Award in 1966.
Scofield made relatively few films, but many of those were theater-related: He played Tobias in the film version of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance in 1974, the French king in Kenneth Branagh's 1989 production of Henry V, the Ghost in Mel Gibson's 1990 version of Hamlet and Judge Thomas Danforth in the 1996 film of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. He also played poet Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford's Quiz Show in 1994.
Appointed a commander of the British Empire in 1956, the intensely private Scofield twice rejected a knighthood, explaining he wished to remain "plain Mister," according to published reports.
Scofield is survived by his wife and children.