Antony Sher, an actor known for his masterly interpretations of Shakespeare’s great characters and for his versatility, died on Thursday at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
The cause was cancer, said the Royal Shakespeare Company, with which Mr. Sher had been closely associated for more than four decades.
In The Times of London, Sheridan Morely described his portrayal as “the only one in our lifetime to have challenged the 40-year memory of Olivier in that role.” Other critics agreed that it was a career-making performance.
He played Arturo Ui in Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and Joseph K in an adaptation of Kafka’s “The Trial,” and he won his second Olivier Award in 1997 for his portrayal of the painter Stanley Spencer in Pam Gem’s “Stanley.” He was awarded a knighthood for services to the theater in 2000.
Mr. Sher was also a prolific writer and an accomplished artist.
In many of his books he described his connection to, and ambivalence about, South Africa.
He frequently spoke of being drawn to playing outsiders and misfits.
Antony Sher was born in Cape Town on June 14, 1949, the third of four children of Emmanuel Sher, an importer of animal hides, and Margery Sher, who ran the house.
Although his grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who had fled pogroms in Europe, Mr. Sher said he had little sense growing up that they were living amid similarly oppressive conditions for Black people in apartheid South Africa.
Sent by his mother to elocution classes, he was introduced to the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker.
First however, he had to do nine months of national army service, obligatory for all white men in South Africa.
In 1968, Mr. Sher flew to London with his parents and auditioned for both the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
He found a place at the Webber Douglas Academy, where his teachers included Steven Berkoff, then performed with the theater group Gay Sweatshop before landing the role of Ringo Starr in Willy Russell’s Beatles musical “John, Paul, George, Ringo … and Bert,” which transferred to the West End.
He also tried hard, early on, to shed any traces of a South African identity, telling people he was British.
He overcame a cocaine addiction in the mid-1990s and later remarked that he had been able to use that experience in playing Falstaff.