Antony Sher 1949-2021. A Shakespearian actor who was also the History Man
Antony Sher who has sadly died at 72 will rightly be remembered for his Shakespearian acting and other stage roles.
For historians however he also featured in a TV acting role.
Sher played Malcolm Kirk a lecture with a Zapata moustache in the 1981 TV adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975 novel The History Man.
As members of the UCU complete 3 days of strike action over pensions, pay and conditions today, with more to come, it is a reminder of very different and much more hopeful academic times.
There were cuts in education in the later 1970s (when I was a first-degree student at the then Teesside Poly) but overall it was a time of optimism, both in terms of the expansion of academia and in respect of the left politically which Howard Kirk claimed to be a supporter of.
Anyone looking at it now would at least find much room for improvement in how relationships and sexual relationships are handled, a reminder too that the late 1960s had meant liberation for some but not all.
Perhaps the best way to understand Kirk is with the Phil Ochs song Love Me I’m a Liberal.
Sher meantime was a brilliant and versatile actor wherever he played
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