Michael Scudamore Redgrave

Born Mar. 20, 1908, in Bristol. English actor and director.

Redgrave acted in amateur theatricals from 1921 to 1934. In 1934 he began his professional career at the Liverpool Repertory Theater, later acting in theaters in London and Stratford-on-Avon. His roles included Tuzenbakh and Voinitskii in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, Aleksei Turbin in Bulgakov’s Days of the Turbins, Rakitin in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, and the title role in T. Job’s Uncle Harry. Redgrave’s Shakespearean roles have included the title role in Ham let, which he played in the USSR in 1958 and 1959, Shy-lock in The Merchant of Venice, the title role in King Lear, and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra.

Redgrave has staged N. Armstrong’s play Lifeline (1942), Shakespeare’s Henry IV (Part I and Part II, 1951), and Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1956, 1965), as well as Massenet’s opera Werther (1966) and Puccini’s La Bohème (1967). Since 1938 he has acted in films. An advocate of realism on the stage, Redgrave is a follower of the Stanislavsky method.