 Antony Sher won a Laurence Olivier Award and the Evening Standard Award for his breakthrough
performance as Shakespeare's "bottled spider" on crutches and confirmed
his reputation with powerful performances as Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac,
Shylock, Lear's Fool, Macbeth, and Stanley Spencer in Stanley (winning
his second Olivier Award). For Richard III, he went to the lengths of talking
with with doctors, patients, and physical therapists about the physical realities
of playing a hunchback and wrote a book on his experiences entitled Year of
the King. He later voiced the character for a cartoon version of the play.
Stanley Wells wrote that Sher's Richard was "a performance which aims at,
and achieves, brilliance. The opening lines are spoken quietly, almost didactically;
but with 'But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks', Sher advances meacingly
on the audience, his body swinging like a missileon the adeptly manipulated calipers
that support it, his hump displayed with a kind of inverted pride." Close Window
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