John Michael Croft, OBE was an English actor, schoolteacher, and writer.
15 Facts About Michael Croft
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World War II ended any chance of a career in cricket, and Michael Croft joined the RAF in 1940, becoming a sergeant-pilot.
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Michael Croft spent some time on Mediterranean convoys and was a radar operator by the time the war ended in 1945.
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Michael Croft read English but, as he put it, he did not do much "reading", and graduated with a modest BA Honours degree.
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Michael Croft spent most of 1950 doing teacher training at a secondary school in North Oxford.
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Michael Croft was concerned by the sometimes quite brutal methods employed in them, and his experiences there would later inform his largely autobiographical novel Spare the Rod.
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Michael Croft has succeeded in instilling in the minds of his actors a feeling for the stress and rhythm of Shakespeare's verse that would have done credit to a Stratford performance.
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Michael Croft thought about it for some time, and finally decided to try it out, but not just for the Alleyn's boys.
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Shortly after the founding of the Youth Theatre, Michael Croft had been invited to join an international Youth Delegation to China.
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In 1971, Michael Croft was appointed an OBE, and in the same year the NYTGB acquired a permanent theatrical base in the Shaw Theatre, a part of the St Pancras library.
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Michael Croft said that, by then, the National Youth Theatre had probably put on between 100 and 120 plays, and that applications to join it were running at about 3000 a year.
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On 15 February 1978, Michael Croft was a subject of the TV programme This is Your Life.
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Michael Croft died of a heart attack at the age of 64, alone at his home in Kentish Town, London, on 15 November 1986.
14.
Michael Croft had a great appetite for life, food and drink.
15.
Michael Croft has been described as a Falstaff with a thousand Prince Hals.