Richardson, Tony (redirected from Cecil Antonio Richardson)

Richardson, Tony

 orig. Cecil Antonio Richardson

(born June 5, 1928, Shipley, Yorkshire, Eng.—died Nov. 14, 1991, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) British director. With the English Stage Co. he won acclaim with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), and he led the company in reinterpreting classic plays and in productions of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. His experimental productions stimulated a renewal of creative vitality on the British stage during the 1950s. He directed The Entertainer (1958) and A Taste of Honey (1960) on Broadway. He and Osborne formed a film company (1958), which produced screen versions of Osborne's plays as well as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Tom Jones (1963, Academy Award). His later films include The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Ned Kelly (1970), and Blue Sky (1993). He was married to Vanessa Redgrave; their daughters, Miranda and Joely Richardson, are both film actresses.

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Richardson, Tony 

(real name, Cecil Anthony Richardson). Born June 5, 1928, in Shipley, Yorkshire. English theater and motion-picture director.

Richardson graduated from Oxford University, where from 1949 to 1951 he was president of the Dramatic Society. He began his directing career in television. In 1955 he became an associate artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre’s English Stage Company, where he staged contemporary plays devoted to pressing social problems. These plays included Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956; staged in Moscow in 1957), The Entertainer (1957), and Luther (1961) and Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1959). Richardson also staged works at other theaters, including Shakespeare’s Pericles (1958) and Othello (1959, starring P. Robeson) at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (Stratford-on-Avon), Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Since 1959, Richardson has worked in motion pictures. His films include Look Back in Anger (1958), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), and Tom Jones (1963).

REFERENCE

Sovremennyi angliiskii teatr. Moscow, 1963. (Anthology.)