Colin George Edward Blakely (23 September 1930 â 7 May 1987) was a Northern Irish stage and screen actor. He was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance in Sidney Lumet's Equus (1977), and was nominated twice for a Best Actor in Television (1970, 1987). He was also an Olivier Award nominee.
According to the British Film Institute, Blakely's "chunky form and rumpled, good-natured features tended to direct him towards hero's-friend roles, but there was also an impressive toughness and intensity about his work."
Blakely was born in Bangor, County Down, the son of Victor and Dorothy Blakely (née Ashmore). His mother was a singer in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and his father owned a sports retail shop in Belfast. He attended Sedbergh School in Yorkshire (now Cumbria), England.
At the age of 18, he started work in his family's sports goods shop in Belfast, before going on to work as a timber-loader on the railways. After a spell of amateur dramatics with the Bangor Operatic Society, he turned professional.
In 1958, Blakely made his stage debut in Belfast as Dick McCardle in Master of the House. He also appeared in several Ulster Group Theatre productions, including Gerard McLarnon's The Bonefire (1958) and Patricia O'Connor's The Sparrow's Fall (1959). From 1959 he was at the Royal Court Theatre, appearing in Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance and, to critical approval, The Naming of Murderer's Rock. In the Royal Court production of Saint Joan, starring Joan Plowright, he had the small but prominent role of the English Soldier. Blakely himself said, about his transfer to working in England,
In 1961, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, before joining the National Theatre for its opening in 1963 at the Old Vic; he was part of the NT cast that toured Moscow in 1965, the first time a foreign company was allowed to perform at the Kremlin. Critics and theatre historians have numbered Blakely among the actors like Maggie Smith and Derek Jacobi whose talent emerged in the NT's early years; Laurence Olivier specifically named him as an example of the "Versatile... deeply enthusiastic, courageous, gifted" actors he had sought to hire as director.
Among the many stage plays in which he appeared were The Recruiting Officer, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Filumena Marturano, Volpone and Oedipus. He returned to the Royal Shakespeare in 1971 in Harold Pinter's Old Times and was subsequently in many West End plays.
In 1977, he was nominated for the Olivier Award for Actor of the Year in a New Play for his performance in Just Between Ourselves.
Notable film roles included Maurice Braithwaite in This Sporting Life (1963), Sir Thomas More's house servant Matthew in A Man for All Seasons (1966), Dr. Watson to Robert Stephens's Holmes in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), and the ageing Joseph Stalin in Jack Gold's Red Monarch (1983). In the 1975 British film, It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, derived from the James Herriot books, Blakely played gruff Yorkshire vet Siegfried Farnon.
On stage, Blakely played the psychiatrist in Peter Shaffer's Equus, but for Sidney Lumet's 1977 film adaptation of the play he took the part of the tormented young protagonist's father; he was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He appeared in two films based on the Hercule Poirot novels of Agatha Christie, described as having "all-star" casts: Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). Other film roles included The Long Ships (1964), Young Winston (1972), The National Health (1973), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), The Dogs of War (1980), Nijinsky (1980) and Loophole (1981).
His last film role was in the Italian comedy The World of Don Camillo (1984), directed by and starring Terence Hill.
On television, Blakely appeared in the Armchair Theatre series in 1962, episode "The Hard Knock" and director Charles Crichton unusually cast Blakely in two different roles during the same run of episodes of the 1967 series Man in a Suitcase.
In 1969, Blakely's controversial role as an anguished Jesus Christ in Dennis Potter's Son of Man gained him wide recognition. He became a regular on British television, and in the same year played the leading role in a BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.
Noted for his skill in Shakespearean parts, Blakely appeared on television as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra (1981), directed by Jonathan Miller as part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series; and as Kent in the 1983 Granada Television version of King Lear which starred Laurence Olivier. Other television appearances included The Beiderbecke Affair (1985), Operation Julie (1985) and Paradise Postponed (1986).
In 1961 Blakely married British actress Margaret Whiting: they had worked together in A Moon for the Misbegotten the previous year. The couple had three sons, Drummond, Cameron and Hamish.
Until two months before his death from leukaemia, he was performing in A Chorus of Disapproval in the West End while undergoing chemotherapy. Though visibly in pain from the disease, he recorded a video appeal for routine cancer tests. Blakely died, aged 56, at the Middlesex Hospital on May 7, 1987.
During his lifetime, Blakely was named as one of a postwar generation of British actors who succeeded in making provincial accents more widely heard; in 1993, Belfast actor Stephen Rea said, "Colin Blakely made it possible for all Irish actors to speak in their own voices". In September 2022, a blue plaque in his honour was unveiled at Bangor Drama Club's Studio 1A site.