Jonathan Pryce

• 1. Introduction

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  Jonathan Pryce was born John Price on the 1st of June 1947 in Carmel, Flintshire, the son of a former coal miner who ran a small grocery shop. He grew up Welsh Presbyterian, attended Holywell Grammar School, and briefly trained to be a teacher before a college theatre production changed the course of his life. He applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, won a scholarship, and graduated in 1971. He could not even use his own name when he joined Equity: there was already a performer named John Price on the rolls, so he became Jonathan Pryce.

  What followed was a career that the profession almost extinguished before it began. A tutor at RADA told him he would never aspire to more than playing villains on Z-Cars. He went on to be hailed as the definitive Hamlet of his generation, to win two Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards, and to earn an Academy Award nomination opposite Anthony Hopkins. He was knighted in 2021 for services to drama and charity.

  How did a grocer's son from a small Welsh village travel that distance? The answers run through a controversial casting battle that nearly cancelled a ten-million-dollar Broadway show, a Terry Gilliam film that became a cult touchstone, and a late-career renaissance that saw him play a pope, a prince consort, and a Shakespearean villain all within a few years of each other.

• 2. From Carmel to RADA

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  Isaac Price, Jonathan's father, had spent years working the coal seam before he and his wife Margaret ran a small general grocery together. Their youngest child had two older sisters and was raised in the Presbyterian Church of Wales. When Pryce reached sixteen, he went to art college rather than directly into work, then shifted again toward teacher training at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk, Lancashire.

  It was there, during a college theatre production, that he found the thing he actually wanted to do. He applied to RADA, received a scholarship, and worked as a door-to-door salesman of velvet paintings to pay his way through training. He graduated in 1971 with the RADA Acting Diploma.

  The name change on joining Equity was not merely administrative. Shedding John Price and becoming Jonathan Pryce meant arriving in the profession without any inherited identity, which suited the kind of actor he was becoming: character-driven, unsentimental, drawn to roles that demanded psychological complexity. His first screen appearance came in 1972 in a minor role in an episode of the science fiction series Doomwatch, just enough to secure his Equity card.

• 3. Liverpool, Comedians, and a Tony

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  Despite his RADA tutor's dismissal, Pryce joined the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool upon graduating and eventually rose to artistic director there. It was at the Everyman, in 1972, that he met actress Kate Fahy; they would not marry until 2015, but she remained his partner through more than four decades of the career that followed.

  The role that first put Pryce in front of a national audience was Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians, a part that Griffiths wrote specifically for him. The production moved from Nottingham Playhouse, where Pryce had worked with director Richard Eyre, to the Old Vic in London. Pryce then reprised the role on Broadway in 1976, this time under director Mike Nichols, and won the 1977 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

  Around the same time he made his first film appearance, playing Joseph Manasse in Voyage of the Damned alongside Faye Dunaway. But he did not trade the stage for the screen. From 1978 to 1979 he performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company in The Taming of the Shrew as Petruchio and in Antony and Cleopatra as Octavius Caesar, the two roles signalling a range that would become his career-long signature.

• 4. Hamlet and the Hitchhiker

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  In 1980, Pryce played Hamlet at the Royal Court Theatre and won his first Olivier Award. Some critics called it the definitive Hamlet of his generation, a verdict that placed him at the top of the British theatrical hierarchy while he was still in his early thirties.

  That same year brought a stranger engagement. Pryce took a small but pivotal role as Zarniwoop in the twelfth episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series. His character questions the ruler of the Universe, a solipsist who has been chosen to rule because of either his inherent manipulability or his immunity to it, depending on your philosophical reading. Pryce reprised the role for the Quintessential Phase, broadcast in 2005.

  In 1983 he played the sinister Mr Dark in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the Ray Bradbury adaptation, adding another villain to a growing gallery of morally unsettling characters. Yet his RADA tutor's prophecy that he could only play villains was already being disproved. The range was there from the start; what remained was for a filmmaker daring enough to exploit it fully. That filmmaker was Terry Gilliam, and the film was Brazil.

• 5. Brazil and Its Aftermath

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  Brazil arrived in 1985 and gave Pryce his first major screen lead: Sam Lowry, the subdued protagonist of Gilliam's science fiction dystopian dark comedy. The film earned him the kind of critical attention that stage work rarely translates across to, and it established him as an actor capable of anchoring a large-scale, formally demanding picture.

  The same year he appeared in The Doctor and the Devils and continued to work on stage, drawing notice for his portrayal of the self-doubting writer Trigorin in a London production of Chekhov's The Seagull. From 1986 to 1987 he led the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth at the Barbican, with Sinead Cusack as Lady Macbeth.

  He reunited with Gilliam on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1988, playing a character called The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson. The production became a notorious financial disaster; it cost more than forty million dollars against an original budget of twenty-three and a half million. The following year Pryce appeared in three early episodes of the improvisation programme Whose Line Is It Anyway? alongside Paul Merton and John Sessions, a detour that showed he was not precious about the forms his work might take. It was also around this time that he saw his friend Patti LuPone in the original London production of Les Miserables, and decided he wanted to do musicals.

• 6. Miss Saigon and the Casting Battle

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  Pryce originated the role of The Engineer, a Eurasian pimp, in the West End musical Miss Saigon in 1990 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He won the Olivier and Variety Club awards for the performance in England. When the production prepared to transfer to Broadway, the Actors' Equity Association moved to block him.

  The AEA's executive secretary stated that the casting of a Caucasian actor made up to appear Asian was an affront to the Asian community. The London production had featured Pryce in yellowface, with prosthetics altering the shape of his eyes and makeup changing the colour of his skin. Producer Cameron Mackintosh responded by announcing he would cancel the ten-million-dollar New York production outright rather than recast.

  The standoff drew strong reactions from within the acting community. Both Charlton Heston and John Malkovich threatened to leave the union if Pryce were prevented from performing. Recognising that the cancellation would eliminate many jobs, the AEA reached a deal with Mackintosh, and Pryce appeared in the production. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical in 1991. The playwright David Henry Hwang later credited the controversy as the direct inspiration for two of his plays: Face Value and Yellow Face.

• 7. Pope, Prince, and Late Acclaim

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  In 2018, Pryce starred alongside Eileen Atkins in Florian Zeller's play The Height of the Storm at Wyndham's Theatre in the West End, playing an elderly man struggling with early forms of dementia. Critic Marilyn Stasio of Variety described his performance as achingly sensitive and like quicksilver. The Guardian named it best play of the year. The production transferred to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway, running from September to November 2019.

  Late that same year came The Two Popes, Fernando Meirelles' Netflix film in which Pryce played Pope Francis opposite Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict XVI. Meirelles cast him for his resemblance to the real Francis. Critic Stephen Farber, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, noted that Pryce goes head-to-head against Hopkins and matches him in subtlety as well as charismatic force. The role earned Pryce his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor.

  In August 2020, Netflix announced he would play Prince Philip in the final two seasons of The Crown. His performance in the fifth season earned a Golden Globe nomination, and his sixth-season work earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Pryce was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity. He went on to star from 2022 to 2024 in the Apple TV+ spy series Slow Horses as a retired senior MI5 officer, a role that moved from guest status in its first seasons to a main role in its fourth.

• 8. Gilliam, Shakespeare, and Breadth

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  Across five decades Pryce has returned repeatedly to two collaborators who define the outer edges of his range. With Terry Gilliam he made Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Brothers Grimm in 2005, and then The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2018, in which he played Don Quixote opposite Adam Driver. Four films with one director, each demanding a different register.

  With Shakespeare the relationship is even longer. He played Petruchio and Octavius Caesar with the RSC in the late 1970s, Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980, Macbeth with the RSC from 1986 to 1987, King Lear at the Almeida Theatre in 2012, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare's Globe in 2015. In that Globe production, his real-life daughter Phoebe played Shylock's daughter Jessica.

  He also played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady twice, first in a 2001 production at the Royal National Theatre and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and again at the Kennedy Center in 2013. The 2001 run became a small legend of theatrical contingency: leading actress Martine McCutcheon fell ill repeatedly, her understudy Alexandra Jay also fell sick hours before a performance, forcing understudy Kerry Ellis to step in. Pryce introduced Ellis to the audience that first night by saying that this would be her first Eliza, his second that day, and his third that week, and that any audience member interested in playing Eliza could find applications at the door. He performed opposite four different Elizas over the course of fourteen months.