Michael Howell Blakemore OBE, AO (born 18 June 1928) is an Australian actor, writer and theatre director who has also made a handful of films. A former Associate Director of the National Theatre, in 2000 he became the only individual to win Tony Awards for best Director of a Play and Musical in the same year for Copenhagen and Kiss Me, Kate.
Biography
Early life and career
Blakemore was born in Sydney, Australia, son of Conrad Howell Blakemore and his wife, Una Mary Litchfield. He married English actress Shirley Bush. Blakemore was educated at The King's School, Sydney, and went on to study medicine at the University of Sydney.
Blakemore's first job in the theatre was as press agent for Robert Morley during the Australian tour of Edward, My Son, who advised him to try drama school. In 1950 he came to London, enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and trained as an actor until 1952. He made his first professional stage appearance in 1952 at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield, as the doctor in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
He then worked for several years in repertory including Birmingham Repertory Company, Bristol and Coventry, and made his first London appearance at the Princes Theatre in March 1958 as Jack Poyntz in the musical play School. He also played small parts at Stratford in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre's 1959 season. It was at the latter that he met and worked with Laurence Olivier and Peter Hall.
Turns to directing
He appeared in two seasons at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, playing Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost in 1962; Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing and Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1963. At the Comedy Theatre in December 1963 he played Badger in Toad of Toad Hall, then toured Australia as Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head. He joined the Glasgow Citizens 1966–67, where his parts included George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence. During this period and after acting for some 15 years, Blakemore decided that his true calling was in directing. For the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow he directed The Investigation, Little Malcolm, Stephen D and Nightmare Abbey in 1966; and The Strange Case of Martin Richter, The Visions of Simone Machard, A Choice of Wars and Rosmersholm in 1967. He became its Co-Artistic Director in 1968 and had a great success with Peter Nichols A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in 1967, accompanying the play on its moves to London that year and to Broadway in 1968, earning his first Tony nomination for directing.
National Theatre
In 1969, Blakemore joined the National Theatre at the Old Vic to direct The National Health by Peter Nichols. He later directed Laurence Olivier in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1971). In 1970, as the National Theatre began a slow, and much delayed, transition from the Old Vic premises to the multi-stage South Bank site, Blakemore was invited by Laurence Olivier to become one of two Associate Directors. Since Olivier had already suffered from medical crises that were a feature of the last quarter of his life, the question of eventual succession as Artistic Director was obviously in the background. Blakemore felt he was a probable candidate, and indeed, according to Olivier's biographer Philip Ziegler, he was highly favoured.
However, in 1973 the Board of the National Theatre appointed Peter Hall without consulting Olivier. Blakemore wrote:
Blakemore and Hall had been rivals during the 1959 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, when Hall had directed Blakemore as an actor and both had had romantic ideas about Vanessa Redgrave. Blakemore became one of ten associate directors forming what was called a planning committee. Blakemore and Hall's rivalry was dramatised when Blakemore presented a formal manifesto to the committee recommending reform. The committee refused to discuss the manifesto and Blakemore was eventually forced to resign when his salary was stopped without warning or explanation. His other productions included Tyger by Adrian Mitchell, co-directed with John Dexter (1971), The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1972), Macbeth (1972), The Cherry Orchard (translated by Ronald Hingley, 1973), Grand Manoeuvres (1974), Engaged by W. S. Gilbert (1975), and Plunder by Ben Travers (1976).