Ian Charleson was one of the finest actors of his generation and an important figure in the fight for gay rights. Yet the extraordinary circumstances of his final performance as Hamlet, just months before his death, are less familiar. Now, a new film is bringing that haunting production back to life.
Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone and starring Andrew Scott as the Scottish actor, will premiere at Telluride this weekend before opening the London film festival in October. Charleson was 40 and terminally ill with Aids when he was cast as Hamlet in Richard Eyre’s 1989 production at the National Theatre, after Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly left the role. Charleson had first played Hamlet 15 years earlier and persuaded Eyre to let him reprise it, despite the director’s misgivings about his health.
He was beautiful, and he had a beautiful singing voice.” Eyre remembered sitting with Charleson in the National’s canteen a year earlier, when the actor was starring in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. So when Dan had his breakdown” – Day-Lewis believed he saw the ghost of his father onstage – “I thought, I will approach Ian. We met, and then I realised Ian was was very ill.
But I thought I will go with him anyway.” The cast, crew, and audience were told that Charleson’s face was swollen after a sinus operation. In reality, he was suffering from septicaemia, enduring painful acupuncture during rehearsals and, later, chemotherapy. Most people told me I was absolutely insane.
The press were characteristically loathsome in their probing. I just stubbornly stuck to my decision. In retrospect, it was the right one.
He was heroic, and utterly brilliant in the part.” The production ran for six weeks and was widely regarded as one of the finest Hamlets seen on stage. The day after Charleson’s last show, Ian McKellen refused the Evening Standard award for best actor and gave his statuette to Charleson instead. Charleson died on 6 January 1990, eight weeks later, having asked that Aids be recorded as the cause – an unusually public act at a time when the disease was feared and stigmatised.
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