Michael PenningtonMichael Pennington was a leading classical actor and, with Michael Bogdanov, co-founder of the English Shakespeare Company. For the English Shakespeare Company and the RSC, he played Hamlet, Timon of Athens, Berowne, Edgar, Mercutio, Angelo, Richard I, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Henry V, Leontes and Jack Cade. He directed Twelfth Night in the UK, Tokyo and Chicago and The Hamlet Project for the National Theatre Bucharest. In 2004 he gave the British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, the first practitioner to do so since 1925. He played leading roles in Chekhov, Ibsen, de Filippo, Euripides, Molière, Congreve, Osborne, Pinter, Harwood, O'Casey, Tolstoy, Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Stoppard, Bulgakov, Shaffer, Granville-Barker, Brenton, Orton, Hecht and MacArthur, Mamet, Strindberg and many others. Among his film and television roles were Michael Foot in The Iron Lady (2011) and the Death Star station commander Moff Jerjerrod in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983). He was the author of Hamlet: A User's Guide and similar guides to Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream; The Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg (Faber, with Stephen Unwin); Sweet William: Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare; and Are You There, Crocodile? Inventing Anton Chekhov. Michael Pennington died in 2026. Read More Read Less