IN FOND MEMORY

MICHAEL HOWARD (d. 2009)

Michael Howard, one of The Questors most distinguished actors of the seventies and eighties, has died at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire, at the age of 88. Michael was an experienced and polished actor and quickly became established as one of our stars. Tremendously versatile, he gave hilarious performances in Orton's What the Butler Saw and Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus. One of his greatest roles was the bumbling old headmaster in Bennett's Forty Years On, a superb blending of comedy and pathos. In The Coarse Acting Show of 1983 he gave a memorable vignette as Valium, a Roman senator in the Antony and Cleopatra take-off.

His last show in 1987 was his greatest, playing the 17th century diarist Aubrey in Brief Lives, the only character in the play. This involved being alone on stage for two hours, a truly great feat for an actor in his late sixties but Michael carried it off superbly
.
Mike Green

[QNews 18, March 2009]


MICHAEL HOWARD AT THE QUESTORS
1977 Absurd Person Singular
1978 Blood Relations
1978 Hay Fever
1979 Jumpers
1979 A Man for All Seasons
1980 Macbeth
1980 Playground
1980 Pygmalion
1981 Forty Years On
1981 No Man's Land
1983 Habeas Corpus
1983 The Third Great Coarse Acting Show
1984 Lark Rise
1985 Bedroom Farce
1985 Tom Jones
1986 Whose Life is it Anyway?
1987 Brief Lives