Ian Charleson was a Scottish stage and film actor.
35 Facts About Ian Charleson
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Ian Charleson is best known internationally for his starring role as Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Chariots of Fire.
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Ian Charleson is well known for his portrayal of Rev Charlie Andrews in the 1982 Oscar-winning film Gandhi.
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Ian Charleson performed numerous Shakespearean roles, and in 1991 the annual Ian Charleson Awards were established, particularly in honour of his final Hamlet.
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Alan Bates wrote that Ian Charleson was "definitely among the top ten actors of his age group".
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Ian McKellen said Charleson was "the most unmannered and unactorish of actors: always truthful, always honest".
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Ian Charleson was diagnosed with HIV in 1986, and died in 1990 at the age of 40.
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Ian Charleson requested that it be announced after his death that he had died of AIDS, in order to publicise the condition.
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Ian Charleson won a scholarship to and attended Edinburgh's Royal High School; and in his teens, he joined and performed with The Jasons, an Edinburgh amateur theatrical group.
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Ian Charleson sang solo as a boy soprano in church and in the Royal High School choir, which performed on the radio and in Edinburgh Festival concerts.
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Ian Charleson won a scholarship to the University of Edinburgh, which he attended from 1967 to 1970, obtaining a three-year Scottish MA Ordinary degree.
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Ian Charleson changed his study concentration accordingly, and graduated with a degree in English, fine art, and mathematics.
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From 1967 through 1973, Ian Charleson performed often at the Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, becoming a noted actor in those circles.
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From LAMDA, Ian Charleson was hired by Frank Dunlop's Young Vic Theatre Company.
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Ian Charleson made his professional stage debut in 1972 with the Young Vic, as one of the brothers in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was televised in the UK that same year by Granada Television.
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Ian Charleson traveled with the company to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York that same year, to appear as Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, Ottavio in Scapino, and Brian Curtis in French Without Tears.
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Ian Charleson made his West End debut in 1975, in a long-running production of Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged at the Queen's Theatre.
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Ian Charleson next appeared at the National Theatre, where he performed Octavius in Julius Caesar in 1977.
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Ian Charleson was a glowingly reviewed Sky Masterson in Richard Eyre's enormously successful revival of the musical Guys and Dolls, opposite Julie Covington as Sister Sarah, with Bob Hoskins as Nathan Detroit and Julia McKenzie as Adelaide.
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Ian Charleson received an Olivier Award nomination for Actor of the Year in a New Play as Eddie in Sam Shepard's gritty and very physical two-person drama, Fool for Love, opposite Julie Walters as his on-again off-again love object.
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Director Richard Eyre, with some initial misgivings based on Ian Charleson's health, had brought him in to replace Daniel Day-Lewis, who had abandoned the production.
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The way Ian Charleson can transform a production is a reminder that actors are alive and well, that directors can only draw a performance from those who have one in them and that in the last analysis the voice of drama speaks to us through actors.
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The day following Charleson's final Hamlet performance, when Ian McKellen was given the Evening Standard Award for Best Actor for his Iago in Othello, McKellen offered thanks, but said having seen "the perfect Hamlet" at the National Theatre the previous night, he thought that not he but Ian Charleson was truly the Best Actor of 1989, and he gave Charleson his statuette.
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Ian Charleson prepared for the role by studying the Bible intensively, and he himself wrote Liddell's stirring post-race address to the workingmen's crowd.
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Ian Charleson had a similar success the following year, playing Mahatma Gandhi's closest friend and collaborator, the Anglican priest Charlie Andrews, in Gandhi, opposite Ben Kingsley.
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Ian Charleson's drive to pursue a rich stage career focusing on Shakespearean leads remained strong.
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Ian Charleson's notable starring television roles in the 1970s include: Anthony in A Private Matter, his first starring screen role, opposite Rachel Kempson; slick and cruel John Ross preying on Scottish immigrants to the New World in O Canada in the anthology series Churchill's People; and one of two British soldiers who find military life nearly unbearable in The Paradise Run, directed by Michael Apted.
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Ian Charleson used his tenor singing voice in musicals and other performances.
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Ian Charleson did notable solo singing work in productions including Much Ado About Nothing, an episode of Rock Follies of '77, The Tempest, Piaf, Guys and Dolls, A Royal Night of One Hundred Stars, After Aida, Andrew Lloyd Webber's and Tim Rice's Cricket, Sondheim: A Celebration, and Bent.
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Ian Charleson sang classic standards and show tunes, and the songs of Robert Burns, in variety programmes on stage and television.
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Ian Charleson, who was gay, was diagnosed with HIV in 1986 during the AIDS pandemic, and died of AIDS-related causes in January 1990 at the age of 40.
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Ian Charleson died eight weeks after performing the title role in a run of Hamlet, in Richard Eyre's production at the Olivier Theatre.
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Fellow actor and friend Ian McKellen said that Charleson played Hamlet so well it was as if he had rehearsed the role all his life.
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Ian Charleson requested that it be announced after his death that he had died of AIDS, in order to publicise the condition.
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Ian Charleson was nominated for the Olivier Award for Actor of the Year in a New Play, for his starring role as Eddie in Fool for Love in 1984.