Морис Эванс: Жизнь и творчество английского актера.

English actor

Maurice Herbert Evans (3 June 1901 – 12 March 1989) was an English actor, noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. His best known screen roles include Dr. Zaius in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and Maurice on Bewitched.

Evans was born at 28 Icen Way in Dorchester, Dorset. He was the son of Laura (Turner) and Alfred Herbert Evans, a Welsh dispensing chemist and keen amateur actor who made adaptations of novels by Thomas Hardy for the local amateur company. Young Maurice made his first stage appearance as a small boy in Far from the Madding Crowd. He first appeared on the stage in 1926 at the Cambridge Festival Theatre and joined the Old Vic Company in 1934, playing Hamlet, Richard II, and Iago. He was selected by Terence Gray to appear in the opening production in November 1926 at the Festival Theatre, taking the part of Orestes in two parts of the sensational production of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This was followed by Lord Belvoir in The Man Who Ate the Popomack by W. J. Turner, and Saint Anthony in Maeterlinck's The Miracle of Saint Anthony. In 1927, Evans played a poet in The Pleasure Garden by Beatrice Mayor followed by Young Man in On Baile's Strand by W. B. Yeats, Midir in The Immortal Hour by Fiona Macleod, the Hon. Algernon Moodie in The Rumour by C. K. Munro, Mark Ingestire in Sweeney Todd by Dibdin Pitt, the poet in The Lost Silk Hat by Lord Dunsany, the Captain in Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw, Mister Four and Young Man in The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, Don Juan in the play of the same title by James Elroy Flecker, two parts in Terence Gray's own play The Red Nights of the Tcheka, the Stage Manager in The Player Queen (also by Yeats), the Second Engineer in The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers, Prince Kamose in another Gray play called And in the Tomb, and finally in June 1927, Don Pelegari in Pirandello's Each In His Own Way. Both Yeats and Shaw attended performances of their own plays.

Although he had taken U. S. citizenship in 1941, Evans had returned to Britain by the end of the 1960s. Aside from an infrequent trip to the United States and occasional visits to retired actors in financial need (as a representative of the Actors' Fund, of which he was a longtime trustee), he lived quietly near Brighton. He never married, and was survived by a brother, Hugh, of London.

Evans died, aged 87, in Rottingdean, East Sussex, England.