.. of not acting, but being. I have only seen Olivier on film, but always, from Othello to the character of Archie Rice in, ‘The Entertainer’, you went away thinking that you had seen a magnificent performance, superb ‘Acting’ but not the quiet revelation that Scofield could give.
Most of our generation know him in the Oscar-winning performance role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play and film A Man for All Seasons. To me he brought more than mere acting to the role; somehow the good-humoured moral strength and gentle melancholy were the mark of a truly moral and principled person…….and not just the actor. The Thomas More that he created was real and vulnerable, almost amused by the beliefs that he knew would be his undoing, but believing, even if they were not right, that the virtue of not being swayed from them defined what he should be. This was not a man playing a man of principle; this was a man of principle, intelligent, wily and full of grace.
This is a defining and consummately great performance, and you can only wish that he had done more on film so that we could have seen him more. He was a man of the theatre, possessed of a face which seemed to become, not so much lined, as cracked like ancient rock. He had the most beautiful voice, that was, when he so chose, deep and seductive, like warm, wry honey. Fred Zinnemann’s famous quote that it reminded him of a Rolls Royce being started does not do it justice.
The deepest Scofield would go into analysis of the art of acting was, ‘I enjoy the loss of myself, of discovering a writer's human creation . . . Effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to make effects; I wanted . . . to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.’ And he did.
In film and television, you would have seen him, had you been attentive, as the ghost opposite Mel Gibson, in Franco Zefferelli’s version of Hamlet; as the American professor Mark Van Doren in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show (1994); as Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible (1996), opposite Daniel Day-Lewis; and as both the wealthy grandfather and the amoral great-uncle of the title character in a 1994 television adaptation of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.
By every account, even though he was regarded by both critics and peers as one of the greatest actors of several generations, he was quiet, withdrawn and modest; after a performance simply getting on the commuter train back to his family; living only ten miles or so from where he was born.
‘I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public,’ Scofield once said. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labelled.’
He puts himself apart from our fascination with actors and acting which for most people is blurred into a media frenzy of stars and stardom; he is far removed from the colourful oil slick of tabloid journalism. Anybody who has ever been on the stage knows deeply that what he did was unparalleled. Unlike Salieri, crying to his maker how unfair it was that only he could appreciate the true greatness of Mozart’s limitless talents, we cannot complain, for we could all see it. I just feel cheated that it is an experience now lost, except for a few fragmentary flickers on celluloid or screen.
I have seen bravura theatrical performances – Anthony Sher in Richard III, where the rest of the cast of the Royal Shakespeare company need not have turned up, or the great ensemble piece of Peter Hall’s Midsummer Nights Dream, but never performances that were so human, that existed somewhere beyond acting.
Let me put this in relative terms. Speaking in public is, apparently, one of our greatest fears. To be put in the situation of addressing an audience, be it as father of the bride or a even a simple business presentation, is to create absolute terror for most of the population.
So it is understandable that being on stage, having to remember and say several hundred lines of dialogue in synchronisation with other members of the cast and not falling over the furniture, is an order of magnitude beyond the fear of public speaking. For a rational person something so fraught with the possibility of public humiliation should be avoided at all costs. Nude skydiving is, apparently, preferable.
An actor does this night after night - not just once - as a stage actor has no opportunity to re-shoot a scene forty times until it is picture perfect. Scofield could create his character to a live audience freshly six days a week in a way that would leave every audience touched to their core.
Having done some amateur theatre, I enjoyed the fear of walking onto the stage and wondering, not just whether I could hold it together, but even if I could remember the first lines. But I for me it was an indulgence that I loved, knowing that I was a bumbling amateur and that I had another job to go to. You don’t know how difficult it is until you try it. You can get on the stage and make all the right moves but you are nowhere being an actor.
I once played the role of Bassanio, the totally forgettable romantic lead in the Merchant of Venice – he for whom Portia incomprehensively pines. I know that I acted it with all the charm of a corpse being propped up by large rectal thermometer wedged between buttocks firmly clenched in rigor mortis. Being on the stage had the advantage of not being in the audience and watching me.

Paul Scofield would have made him a person of infinite variety. He was a great actor, a personal ideal; the world is diminished by his passing.