TheatreObituaryTom Beard obituary
Deft, poised supporting actor on stage and in popular television seriesThe actor Tom Beard, who has died aged 50 from cancer, was a handsome, robust supporting player generallyadmired for his athleticism, onstage and off. He was also, as his brother Alex, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, put it, the moral backbone of any company he joined.
He shared qualities of wit, poise and deftness with Colin Firth, an actor he physically resembled, without attracting a comparable limelight. The role that brought him to theatrical prominence was Laertes, opposite Stephen Dillane’s Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall, which opened the renamed Gielgud theatre (formerly the Globe) on Shaftesbury Avenue in 1994. He had featured as Marlowe in Hall’s West End production of She Stoops to Conquer the previous year.
Although he was a fixture on television thereafter, appearing in such popular series as Foyle’s War, Wallander (the Kenneth Branagh version), Midsomer Murders, Spooks, Poirot and Holby City, his stage career spluttered until coming into focus again in two new plays by Polly Stenham – Tusk Tusk at the Royal Court (2009), Hotel at the National Theatre (2014) – and as the Duke of Albany in the Derek Jacobi King Lear, Michael Grandage’s swift and forensic production at the Donmar Warehouse in 2010.
Tom was born in London, the second son of Charles Beard, a plastic surgeon, and his wife, Patricia (nee Johnston), a flautist. He was educated at Westminster school and Sussex University, where he read politics and German, and trained for the stage – he had been passionate about acting since his schooldays – at the Webber Douglas school in London. Throughout his youth, and beyond, he was a talented footballer, cricketer and tennis player – anything with a ball, basically.
He left London to play some major roles – Collie Stratton in Somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered, directed by Edward Hall, at the Watermill, Newbury; Elyot Chase in Noël Coward’s Private Lives in Ipswich; Macduff in Macbeth at the Sheffield Crucible, directed by Philip Franks – but in the West End he was in no way eclipsed by an all-star cast – Kristin Scott Thomas, Robert Bathurst, Douglas Hodge, Eric Sykes – in Michael Blakemore’s 2003 production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, newly translated by Christopher Hampton, at the Playhouse theatre. Reviewers described his performance as the conflicted and difficult Solyony as brilliant, unsettling and splendidly irritating.
And he enjoyed a good run of parts with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Michael Boyd’s memorable Henry VI trilogy at the Swan in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2000, and at the Young Vic in the following year, starting with the Duke of Alençon in Part One and completing the story of Edward IV through the next two plays and Richard III. In 2002, he played Lysimachus, the kindly governor of Mytilene in Adrian Noble’s RSC production of Pericles, which opened in Stratford-upon-Avon and played a season at the Roundhouse in north London; he arrived in the brothel to indulge himself and left struck by Marina’s purity and goodness (“Thou art a piece of virtue, and I doubt not but thy training hath been noble”), the agent of her salvation.
In Stenham’s Tusk Tusk, he was the well-meaning neighbour of the three abandoned middle-class children whose psychotic absentee mother had been more than just a good friend to him. He represented slightly tarnished adulthood again as an exposed internet purveyor in Hotel, a remarkable and controversial play of two distinct halves, juggling themes of a dysfunctional marriage, sibling savagery and emotional excess, stirring in elements of colonial revenge and racist unrest.
His films were few, but they included fine cameos as an army officer in Mira Nair’s oddly compelling Vanity Fair (2004)co-written by Julian Fellowes and starring Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp; as a priest in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter (2010), written by Peter Morgan; and as Peter Maxwell in Lasse Halström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) with Emily Blunt, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ewan McGregor.
In 1992 he married Polly Hitching. She survives him, as do their two children, Ella and Joe, his brother and his mother. Thomas Simon Henry Beard, actor, born 25 April 1965; died 20 July 2015
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