Despite a life replete with theatrical acclaim, a knighthood and a string of famous friends, Antony Sher struggled with crippling anxiety and overwhelming feelings of inadequacy.
He once wrote that, as he was being introduced to the Queen as one of Britain’s finest classical actors, an inner voice taunted him: ‘I’m just a little gay Yid from the other side of the world. I shouldn’t be here.’
Yet such was his talent, at times he seemed to embody the critics’ dictum about King Lear: Sher was ‘too huge for the stage’.
Whether ‘climbing Everest’, as he described the effort of performing Shakespeare’s foolish monarch, playing Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, or while conveying Macbeth’s paranoia and despair, he was an almost unworldly stage presence: creative, intense and dazzling.
Antony Sher (pictured) as Sir John Falstaff and Alex Hassell as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I and II by William Shakespeare
Sher, whose death from cancer aged 72 was announced yesterday, was widely acknowledged as the greatest actor of his generation, and over the course of his 50-year career, played nearly every major Shakespearean role.
Only Hamlet was omitted, with Sher saying – with characteristic insecurity – that a sense of ‘self-oppression’ prevented him from treading the boards as the Dane.
‘I thought I wasn’t what Hamlet looked like,’ he said. ‘There was an old-fashioned idea that he had to be tall and handsome and blond. But that’s nonsense, of course. I missed it and it’s my own fault. But otherwise, Shakespeare served me very well.’
For Sher language was a performance art. ‘To an actor, dialogue is like food,’ he wrote. ‘You hold it in your mouth, you taste it. If it’s good dialogue, the taste will be distinctive.
‘If it’s Shakespeare dialogue, the taste will be Michelin-starred.’
Yet the banquet of his life was not without its sour notes: at times, Sher was treated for depression as well as cocaine addiction, triggered by his insecurities. ‘I always felt like a trespasser,’ he said.
He had a long-running and viciously jealous feud with the actor Simon Callow, whom at times he felt was being cast in parts that he deserved.
‘I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him,’
