Richardson, Tony

(real name, Cecil Anthony Richardson). Born June 5, 1928, in Shipley, Yorkshire. English theater and motion-picture director.

Richardson graduated from Oxford University, where from 1949 to 1951 he was president of the Dramatic Society. He began his directing career in television. In 1955 he became an associate artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre’s English Stage Company, where he staged contemporary plays devoted to pressing social problems. These plays included Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956; staged in Moscow in 1957), The Entertainer (1957), and Luther (1961) and Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1959). Richardson also staged works at other theaters, including Shakespeare’s Pericles (1958) and Othello (1959, starring P. Robeson) at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (Stratford-on-Avon), Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Since 1959, Richardson has worked in motion pictures. His films include Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and Tom Jones (1963).