R.Onald Pickup, who has died at the age of 80, had the ability to bring great gravitas to high-profile establishment figures. It is no accident that he was cast as Archbishop of Canterbury in the Crown and Neville Chamberlain in Darkest Hour. While Pickup had a successful career in film and television, for people my age he will always be remembered as part of the National Theater company that Laurence Olivier gathered in his early days at the Old Vic. When you consider that Pickup was one of several rising stars including Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon and Anthony Hopkins, you realize that it was a golden generation.
Pickup caught the eye at the Royal Court in 1965 when he played the title role in Shelley: the first of several real figures he was to play, including Verdi, Stravinsky and Einstein. Going back with Olivier’s company at the Old Vic where he started out in small parts, he was a stunning Rosalind in the all-male painting As You Like It in 1967. The result was a bizarre result. it was just Pickal’s Rosalind, in a peak cap and white trouser suit, captured something of the poetic genre that the production looked like.
Pickup succeeded at the Old Vic, playing Baron Tuzenbach in Olivier’s production of Three Sisters and taking over as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s riff over Hamlet’s serving lords. When Frank Dunlop created The Young Vic in 1970, as a light-hearted antithesis of his neighbor Waterloo, he invited Pickup Oedipus to play in the WB Yeats version of Sophocles. My memory is well accomplished by a slow freeze as Oedipus first learned the truth. When Dunlop hosted a tea party in London a couple of years ago, with members of the original Young Vic company in attendance, Pickup introduced a very self-confident story about his Oedipus. “Olivier said,” he said, “the first night came and he said to me afterwards‘ My dear boy, you are playing this amazing text in the most beautiful, intimate theater in London and as So why do you feel the need to fucking shout? ‘”
A year later Pickup found himself playing Edmund, opposite Olivier as James Tyrone, in Michael Blakemore’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Journey Into Night. At the time, I wrote about Pickup “taking out the depths of his bottle with terrifying power while talking to his father”. Olivier also expressed in his own history how grateful he was for Pickup’s symmetry when he found himself completely dry in the middle of their big scene, and interestingly, Hugh Leonard wrote in a review to Pickup “feels unusual in a young actor”.
Pickup put on some great performances at the National. In 1972 he brought to the title role in Richard II a deep and voiceful knowledge that could reach the back of the gallery without effort: above all, I remember the path, as Richard was trying to identify with Christ, he stretched out his arms, “You Pilates here brought me to this bitter cross.” In Trevor Griffiths’ Party, in which Olivier took his last stage in 1973, Pickup played with equal conviction of a left-wing TV producer who opposed his political and physical incompetence.
Pickup went on to do a lot of excellent work in all mediums and was particularly capable, due to his tight frame and skeletal features, at playing wounded artists. But, as it is relatively contemporary, it is for his early work at the National, as well as his later achievements on screen, I will remember him. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the TV that men make a living after but the theater is not worn at all.