Early Life
Richardson was born in Edinburgh, the son of Margaret (née Drummond) and John Richardson. He was educated in the city, at Balgreen Primary School, Tynecastle High School and George Heriot's School. He first appeared on stage at the age of fourteen, in an amateur production of A Tale of Two Cities. The director encouraged his talent, but warned that he would need to lose his Scottish accent to progress as an actor. His mother arranged elocution lessons and he became a stage manager with the semi-professional Edinburgh People's Theatre. After National Service in the Army (part of which he spent as an announcer and drama director with the British Forces Broadcasting Service) he obtained a place at the College of Dramatic Arts in Glasgow. After a period at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre he appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), of which he was a founding member, from 1960 to 1975.
Read more about this topic: Ian Richardson
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For life is the mirror of king and slave—”
—Madeline Bridges (fl. C. 1840)