Michael Pennington - Life and Career

Life and Career

Pennington was born in East Anglia, the son of a Scottish mother (Euphemia Willock (née Fyfe) and a Welsh father (Vivian Maynard Cecil Pennington) and grew up in London. Most of his career has been on stage in works such as Hamlet (RSC), Oedipus the King, The Entertainer, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. In 1986, Pennington and director Michael Bogdanov together founded the English Shakespeare Company. As joint artistic director, he starred in the company's inaugural productions of The Henrys and, in 1987, the seven-play history cycle of The Wars of the Roses, which toured worldwide. He has directed plays including Twelfth Night at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater in the United States. Among his notable TV appearances have been in the title role of "Oedipus the King" and in the television movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes. He appeared in the 2005 film Fragile, co-starring Calista Flockhart. He is the author of the book Are You There, Crocodile? which combines biographical material about the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov with an account of the writing of Pennington's highly successful one-man show about Chekhov; the full text of which is included. He has also written three books about individual Shakespeare plays and most recently "Sweet William - Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare". His solo show "Sweet William" continues to tour worldwide, and a DVD of this will shortly be available.

In April 2004 he became the second actor, after Harley Granville-Barker in 1925, to deliver the British Academy's annual Shakespeare lecture. The lecture was entitled Barnadine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail.