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John Shrapnel, versatile and intelligent actor on stage, film and television – obituary
He had roles in Gladiator and Notting Hill while the psychological depth of his stage roles often made up for directorial deficiencies
John Shrapnel, who has died aged 77, was a fiercely intelligent and commanding actor with a busy career in theatre, film and television and radio – the kind of performer, Robert Harris once observed in the Telegraph, “who you recognise and appreciate whenever he appears … without ever being entirely sure who he is”.
Shrapnel played leading or important supporting roles in numerous RSC and National Theatre productions, making his debut in the latter as the “dear extravagant rogue” Charles Surface in Jonathan Miller’s 1972 NT production of The School for Scandal, the Telegraph’s reviewer John Barber praising his depiction of a “sweaty, unkempt young fellow, straight out of The Rake’s Progress”.
His other roles with the company included Banquo in Macbeth, Pentheus in The Bacchae and Orsino in Twelfth Night.
At the RSC he was Agamemnon in The Greeks (1980); Oedipus in Oedipus Rex (1989); Angelo in Measure for Measure (1990); Creon in Adrian Noble’s flawed production of the Theban plays of Sophocles in 1991-92 – in which role, enthused The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer, he “persuasively [captured] the moral ambiguities” of the ruler of Thebes; and Claudius in Noble’s Hamlet the following year.
On the big screen he made his debut as a factory worker in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). He was the psychiatrist who analyses Richard E Grant’s mentally unstable advertising executive in How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989); a dog-hunting taxidermist in 101 Dalmatians (1996); Anna’s (Julia Roberts’s) UK press agent in Notting Hill (1999); Senator Gaius in Gladiator (2000); a Russian admiral in K-19: The Widowmaker (2001, with Harrison Ford); Nestor in Troy (2004); Lord Howard to Cate Blanchett’s monarch in Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007); and General Grey in The Duchess (2008, with Keira Knightley).
That year, as the occultist Aleister Crowley in the Hammer horror tribute Chemical Wedding, Shrapnel turned in what the Telegraph’s critic Tim Robey described as “the hammiest performance I’ve ever seen”.
On television he took major roles in Jonathan Miller’s BBC Shakespeare series of the 1980s, as Alcibiades in Timon of Athens, Hector in Troilus and Cressida and Kent to Michael Hordern’s King Lear. He was the Earl of Sussex in Elizabeth R (1971, with Glenda Jackson) played Alec Hardinge, private secretary to Edward VIII in Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978) and Sir Percival Glyde in the miniseries The Woman in White (1982).
He featured in numerous popular series including Inspector Morse (also voicing Colin Dexter’s detective on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s), Waking the Dead, and Foyle’s War.
He guest-starred in Midsomer Murders, playing a choir member accused of singing flat by Peter Capaldi in “Death in Chorus” (2006) and a distinguished writer and guest speaker found dead in his hotel room as a result of poisoning in “Written in Blood” (1998).
Reviewers often remarked that Shrapnel’s intelligence and the psychological depth he brought to his roles made up for any directorial deficiencies.
In 2011 when he took the role of Charles Surface’s uncle Sir Oliver Surface in what one critic described as Deborah Warner’s “uncharacteristically duff production” of The School for Scandal at the Barbican, he brought a robust 18th-century sense of fun to an otherwise “lumbering, misguided attempt to breathe fresh life into Sheridan’s 1777 tale of London society”. Shrapnel, the critic felt, should be given a medal.
Similarly, the Sunday Times critic reckoned his performances as the Ghost and Claudius in Sarah Frankcom’s 2014 gender-bending production of Hamlet at Manchester Royal Exchange, starring Maxine Peake in the title role, were the best reasons to see the play: “Playing the apparition of Hamlet’s father, he quickly exhumes layers of pain and horror that are beyond Peake, in her urchin boots, to pursue.
“His Claudius, besuited, but with a gorilla’s stoop and low-hanging arms, exudes an easy menace, and has a voice that certainly sounds as if it’s known ‘the rank sweat of an enseamed bed’ or two.”
John Morley Shrapnel was born in Birmingham on April 27 1942 to Norman and Myfanwy Shrapnel. His father, on active service in the RAF at the time of his birth, went on to join the Manchester Guardian as reporter, book reviewer and theatre critic, becoming the paper’s (and the later Guardian’s) parliamentary correspondent from 1958 to 1975.
An ancestor, Lt Gen Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842), invented the Shrapnel artillery shell – designed to explode – giving his name to the metal fragments produced.
John was educated at Mile End school, Stockport, and the City of London School, where he played Hamlet.
At St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he became active in student productions, taking the title role in Oedipus the King, opposite Miriam Margolyes’s Jocasta, at the Cambridge Guildhall in 1963, the Telegraph’s WA Darlington praising his “voice, presence and authority”.
The same year he was “impressive” as the bar-lounger, rebel and general misfit title character in a student production of Henry Miller’s Just Wild About Harry at the Edinburgh Festival.
He made his professional debut as Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing at the new Nottingham Playhouse in 1965, beginning a long stage career which included the roles of Andrey in Chekhov’s Three Sisters (Cambridge Theatre, 1976); Tesman in Hedda Gabler with Janet Suzman (Duke of York’s Theatre, 1977), and Brutus in Julius Caesar (Riverside Studios, 1980). In 1995 at Chichester, he was “splendidly sinister” as Gibbs, assistant to Harold Pinter’s mustachioed Colonel in Pinter’s The Hothouse.
In 2005 he played the title role in Deborah Warner’s production of Julius Caesar at the Barbican, stepping on to the stage, wrote one critic “like a [Mafia] godfather alighting from a yacht.” As Gloucester to Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool in 2008, Charles Spencer found that he had “all the tragic grandeur and dignity which Postlethwaite largely lacks”.
In 2012 Shrapnel took the central role in Andrew Hilton’s production of the same play at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, presenting a vigorous, silver-haired autocrat who morphs by degrees from swagger to despair.
Shrapnel’s deep, gravelly tones were in great demand for radio plays and voice-overs – and were instantly recognisable advertising products from razors to consumer websites. His work on wildlife productions winning him an award for narration at the 1997 International Wildlife Film Festival.
In 1975 he married Francesca Bartley, a landscape designer, who survives him with three sons, one of whom is the actor Lex Shrapnel. In 2015 the pair appeared together on stage at the Young Vic playing the father and his cloned son in a revival of Caryl Churchill’s A Number.
John Shrapnel, born April 27 1942, died February 14 2020