KENNETH HAIGH

(25 March 1931 - 4 February 2018)

The Yorkshire-born actor Kenneth Haigh has died at the age of 86. If for nothing else, he will have a permanent place in the annals of the British stage, as he was the first actor to play Jimmy Porter, the anti-hero of John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, at London’s Royal Court. He was primarily a stage actor and in his time worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Open Air Regent’s Park, the Haymarket Leicester, the Mermaid Theatre, Chichester Festival, Edinburgh, the Young Vic and in the USA. He appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Strindberg, Pinter, Osborne’s The Hotel in Amsterdam and the Lionel Bart musical Maggie May. The part of Jimmy Porter went to Richard Burton for the film version of Look Back in Anger and Haigh’s film career was perhaps incidental although early on he was in Saint Joan (1957), Cleopatra (1963, as Brutus), A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair (1966). Later films included Eagle in a Cage (as Napoleon), Robin and Marian, The Bitch, Wild Geese II, Shuttlecock with Alan Bates and Man at the Top, a sequel to Room at the Top. Haigh had played Joe Lampton in the TV series and was also seen on television in The Search for the Nile (as the explorer Richard Burton), Moll Flanders, Hazlitt in Love and Maybury. Kenneth Haigh married West Indian model Myrna Stephens in 1974 and they had a son. They divorced in 1985 but stayed friends and Myrna looked after him when he contracted brain damage after swallowing a chicken bone that caused him oxygen starvation.

MICHAEL DARVELL