Michael Bryant CBE
Michael Bryant lived next door to Bill and Jim Checkley in Snailing Lane. He was billeted at Parklands with Tom Cowell; the hosts were the Potter's. Mike did not come down with the main party but he was put with Tom because they were cousins. Mike did spend a little while with us until he went to Battersea Grammar School at Petersfield whilst Charlie Sammonds went to Emanuel School, but Charlie used to cycle from Empshott to Petersfield every day. I don't know what happened to Mike when he left the Potters. Bill told me that he was a Sergeant in the Army Cadet Force at Hawkley, after I had left. One night he was in charge of the evening's activities. Bill was also there and he had an accident, whilst doing some exercise, he fell and broke his arm. Mike came to his rescue. Dismissed the parade and took Bill on the crossbar of his bike down Hawkley Hill to the Doctor's in Liss and after treatment took him home still on the crossbar, but strapped up, to Snailing Lane. Bill says it was the most frightening ride of his life, pitch black, on a crossbar in considerable pain. The upshot was that Bill went to Petersfield Hospital next day, he had in fact broken both bones in his left arm. The prompt action of Mike even if the ride was a bit 'hairy' saved further problems for Bill. The arm healed satisfactorily. So Mike was involved with BCS. Bill has cause to thank him for his prompt action.
Jim Checkley
MICHAEL BRYANT
Award-winning character actor of stage and screen who spent 25 years at the National Theatre
Michael Bryant was an exceptional character actor. Working chiefly in the theatre, he also gave, in the heyday of television drama, two searingly powerful performances there. For the last 25 years of his life he was a member of the National Theatre, where he became a much-admired, much-respected and much loved figure, and from 1998 was an associate director.
He was born in London and educated first at Battersea Central School with whom he was evacuated to Hawkley in Hampshire and then to Battersea Grammar School then located in Petersfield. After serving in both the Merchant Navy and for three years in the Army, he was uncertain what to do with himself back on civvy street. He had already fixed up an interview for a farming course at Cirencester Agricultural College when a chance meeting with an old friend in London, during which both of them drank a great deal, turned his attention to making some use of his gift for mimicry. He trained for the stage at the Webber Douglas School, an old fashioned training that, he said, took him the next three years to unlearn. He got his first small part in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Palace pier, Brighton.
Work in weekly rep at Worthing followed and then a year at Oxford, when the theatre was run by Peter Wood who tried (mostly in vain) to interest his audience in works by Anouilh, Giraudoux and Cocteau. Houses were seldom more than a quarter full – though when Wood decided to put on the very light comedy Seagulls over Sorrento the theatre was packed out.
In the mid-1950s Bryant was making occasional appearances in London, where one of his roles was Willie, the drunken law student in the celebrated premiere of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Arts Theatre, subsequently transferring with it to the old Winter Garden (now the New London). But he made his name initially in Peter Shaffer’s long running first play Five Finger Exercise (Comedy 1958) where he played the sensitive young German tutor who has unwisely idealised the English way of life and has the misfortune to be treated as idol, erotic interest and whipping boy by the family employing him. He acted this also in New York and on the American Tour.
His next long run was as T.E.Lawrence in Rattigan’s Ross (Haymarket 1961) where, in following Alec Guinness in the role, he coped admirably with what could have been an alarming prospect. He played another fatally naïve character in Robert Bolt’s Gentle Jack (Queen’s 1963) where he was a young City financier defeated by rural paganism, personified, believe it or not, by Kenneth Williams. Bryant had a moderately successful engagement with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych (1964-65), though here his first role was hardly propitious – a sailor suited, nine-year-old boy, 5ft 9in tall, in Victor. This offering from the French Absurdist theatre is chiefly memorable for its author’s requirement that the leading lady should fart throughout her performance. Infinitely more rewarding was his Teddy, the strangely undemanding husband in Pinter’s The Homecoming (1965).
Television roles at this time included the son in Talking to a Stranger, an analysis of a family stricken by a mother’s suicide and original for having each of its episodes told from a different character’s viewpoint. His sister was played by Judi Dench. In The Roads to Freedom a 13-part adaptation of Sartre’s sequence of novels, he acted opposite Daniel Massey.
See below for his Colditz performance.
In 1977 Bryant began his long association with the National Theatre, where he discovered the environment that, more than ant others, would attract and test him. His work would begin with Lenin in Robert Bolt’s State of Revolution (1977). It continued to such a piece of supercharged Feydeau lunacy as The Lady From Maxims; the title-role of Ibsen’s Brand (1978); The luxurious old knight, Sir Paul Plyant, of Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1978), and in the same year, David Roberts of the workmen’s committee in Galsworthy’s Strife, which Peter Hall described as a wonderful performance. During 1979-80 he passed from Gregers Werle in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck to Iago (Paul Schofield was Othello), of which a critic wrote: "If one were to seek out a single performance or moment it would be Bryant’s Iago at the time of the exposure of his villainy." Among other parts from a steadily growing list were Len – comedy again – in Alan Ayckbourn’s Sisterly Feelings, Julius Caesar in Howard Brenton’s hotly debated The Romans in Britain (1980), and the farmer-Mayor of Calderon’s The Mayor of Zelamea (1981).
Bryant was a gently moving Uncle Vanya (1982). Seldom resting, he went on, among other parts to the Bishop of Beauvais in Saint Joan (1984), Sir Sampson Legend in Love for Love (1985), a Gloucester in King Lear (1986), agonising in the scene of his blinding, and – no indication here of eloquence for its own sake – one of the bitterest remembered portraits of Prospero in Peter Hall’s production of The Tempest (1988): this travelled also to Russia and Japan. For State of Revolution he won Best Actor in the SWET Awards and for The Mayor of Zelamea another Best Actor Award.
For his portrayal of the Rev. Harry Henderson in Racing Demon he received an Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor, and he continued to appear regularly throughout the 1990s, as Badger in The Wind in the Willows, the Storyteller in Peter Pan, and Caron in The Invention of Love. His last role with the company was as the crumbling Firs in The Cherry Orchard where, in the closing moments of the play, eerily prophetic, he lay down on the empty floor, where a slowing musical box has already expired. He, the toys, a way of life, has all gone into the past.
Michael Bryant was appointed CBE in 1988. He was married twice: to Josephine Martin, with whom he had four children, and then to Judy Coke, who survives him.
Michael Bryant, CBE, actor, was born on April 5th. 1928.
He died on April 25th. 2002, aged 74.
11 October 2002
Sirs,
Indeed, an extremely comprehensive history of Michael Bryant's life. Unfortunately, it would appear, that you have omitted his role, in an episode of the 1972 BBC series, Colditz.
The episode was titled 'Tweedledum' and Michael played the part of Wing Commander George Marsh, who feigned madness, in order to escape, with tragic consequences. I believe this to be one of the finest TV performances EVER and it is a shame that it never received the accolades it deserved.
I would say that I am biased but, I have been told, by people of high standing in the acting profession, that they too, felt that Michael's performance in Colditz, was outstanding.
I hope that you can see your way, to updating your, already comprehensive site, to include his appearance in Colditz.
Warm regards,
Kerrigan Bryant.
(eldest son of Michael)
Hi, - received 15 January 2003
My name is Stephen Laws, and I'm a novelist.
I came across your site recently, which is great. I just wanted to add my voice to Kerrigan Bryant's comments on Michael's appearance in the BBC TV series: COLDITZ. It was - and is - quite simply one of the most staggering and affecting TV acting performances I've ever seen on television. It remains with me, thirty years later.
Also - Michael's hand-stabbing from 'Roads to Freedom'.
And - his pivotal role in one of the great seventies supernatural TV movies: Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPES, now just released on DVD.
And - the deeply touching television play MR AXELFORD'S ANGEL in 1974 with Julia Forster.
Sincerely.
Stephen Laws - www.stephenlaws.com
P.S.) Since no one's mentioned Michael's decapitation by witch's cat in the movie TORTURE GARDEN (1967), I thought I would.
The webmaster is always appreciative of missing information , or indeed corrections.