Anthony May

 

Anthony May

Versatile stage and screen actor whose five-decade career began in the NYT’s seminal Zigger Zagger

 

The Stage

By Nick Smurthwaite

February 16, 2022

Anthony May’s 50-year acting career started with a bang in the title role of Peter Terson’s seminal play about football hooliganism, Zigger Zagger.

Michael Croft’s production for the National Youth Theatre opened at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in 1967 and transferred to the Strand Theatre the next year, with the same cast. May was nominated for a Variety Club award for most promising newcomer. It was also filmed by the BBC.

He went on to have a busy career as a stage and screen actor, making early appearances in Alun Owen’s BBC musical No Trams to Lime Street (1959), Karel Reisz’s 1968 film Isadora and the same year’s TV adaptation of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In 1970, he was seen in the films No Blade of Grass, directed by Cornel Wilde, and Ken Hughes’ Cromwell, playing Richard Cromwell, son of Oliver and his successor as Lord Protector.

May played Hamlet at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter; the title role in The Hostage at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, directed by Richard Eyre; and appeared in a revival of David Halliwell’s play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, playing the title role, at Notting Hill’s Mercury Theatre, directed by John Thaw.

In the 1970s he was one of the founders of the production company Senta, which produced the 1972 film Triple Echo, starring Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed.

Returning to the theatre, May worked regularly at London’s Young Vic under Frank Dunlop’s artistic direction, playing Thomas Cromwell in A Man for All Seasons; Cassio in Othello; Macduff in a touring production of Macbeth; and Albany in King Lear, among others.

In 1978 he played Bobby in the UK premiere of David Mamet’s play American Buffalo, directed by Bill Bryden at the National Theatre.

A sought-after voice artist, May produced and appeared in one-off poetry and music events, and released an album, Rumi in Love, featuring the poetry of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic, whom May called “the Shakespeare of the East”.

His friend and agent Esta Charkham described May as “gentle and kind, spiritual, poetic and always embracingly warm.” As an actor, she says, he made “unusual and brave choices, often going by what was the right job for him, rather than pursuing fame and success”.

Anthony May was born on May 23, 1946, and died on December 24, 2021, aged 75. He is survived by his wife, the actor Vanessa Pett, their daughter Lily, and two children, Jack and Jessie, from his first marriage.

 

MAY, Anthony

Born: 5/23/1946, Reigate, Surrey, England, U.K.

Died: 12/24/2021, U.K.

 

Anthony May’s western – actor:

Sky Bandits – 1986 (guard)