Biography

Biography

Robert Archibald Shaw was born on August 9, 1927 in Westhoughton, Lancashire, England. Shaw would not remember a lot about where he was born because his family moved to Oaklea House in Bolton Road at six months of age. At the age of 6, his family moved to Stromness (Orkney, Scotland) where his father Thomas Archibald Shaw became a well respected doctor. Shaw's memories of these days were summed up as "wind, black water and no trees." His mother Doreen Nora Avery also worked, which was rare for women in those days. She was born in Piggs Peak, in Swaziland, South Africa, and Shaw remembered her as a "remarkable woman, extraordinarily independent." She met Shaw's father while she was a nurse at the Truro Hospital in Cornwall. His mother returned to Swaziland in 1953, to teach reading and writing to children in a small country school. Robert Shaw wrote his first novel at the age of 9, about four men who get lost at sea. Dr. Shaw also had a drinking problem and was a manic depressive, which lead to his death, an overdose of opium when young Robert was at boarding school in Somerset. After his father's death, Robert was left as the man of the house at the tender age of 12, to his three sisters Elizabeth, Joanna and Wendy and brother Alexander. He later stated that had his father lived, he probably would not have become an actor but a doctor instead. "People in the English upper-middle class just didn't become actors. Nobody in my family has ever become an actor-ever." His brother and one of his sisters went to Cambridge and another sister went to Oxford.

As a boy, he attended school in Truro and was quite an athlete, competing in rugby (apparently, Wigan RC offered him a place once which he had to turn down because of a back injury that also prevented him from joining the Army), squash and track events but turned down an offer for a scholarship at 17 to go to London with furthering education in Cambridge as he did not want a career in medicine but luckily for the rest of us, in acting. Shaw said that he had loved school, he claimed he was good in classes as well but had a tendency to be lazy. He won a prize at school for playing Richard the Lion Heart in a one-act play. His name was put on a scroll and there was a lot of applause and I think it was then that Robert Shaw first discovered his love of acting, something that gave him immense pleasure and satisfaction, the most pleasurable thing he knew except scoring in a football match. He was also inspired by one of the schoolmasters, Cyril Wilkes who got him to read just about everything, including all of the classics. He would take three or four of the boys to London to see plays. The first play Robert would ever see was "Hamlet" in 1944 with Sir John Gielgud at the Haymarket. Wilkes took the boys to see several plays during a school holiday and it was there that Shaw became hooked, reading Hamlet from beginning to end that night and talking to Wilkes until two or three in the morning about books and politics. Wilkes told him not to become a professional actor, saying that he didn't have the temperament for it, that he was too rebellious and wanted his own way too much. He would later discover that the schoolmaster said that to all of his students, on the theory that if you're set on doing something, you'll do it no matter what.

He was a teacher at Glenhow in Saltburn, Yorkshire where he taught cricket, rugby, English, French and arithmetic for a short period but instead of attending Cambridge after receiving a scholarship in 1945, Robert went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts with a $1,000 inheritance from his grandmother. He went on from the Academy, after two years (1946-1948) to Stratford-on-Avon, where he was directed by Sir John Gielgud who said to Robert Shaw, "I do admire you and think you've got a lot of ability, and I'd like to help you, but you make me so nervous." He then went on to make his professional stage debut in 1949 and tour Australia in the same year with the Old Vic. He had joined the Old Vic at the invitation of Tyrone Guthrie, who had directed him as the Duke of Suffolk in "Henry VIII" at Stratford. He played nothing but lesser Shakespearean roles, Cassio in "Othello" and Lysander in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and toured Europe and South Africa with the company. Robert Shaw was sold on Shakespeare and thought that it would be his theatrical life at that stage. He was discovered whilst performing in “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1950 at Stratford by Sir Alec Guinness who suggested he come to London to do Hamlet with him. He then went on to his first film role, a very small part in the classic "The Lavender Hill Mob" with Sir Alec Guinness but a start nonetheless.

It was also at this time that he married his first wife, Jennifer Bourke, an actress he had met while working at the Old Vic and married her in Sallsbury, South Rhodesia on August 1, 1952. She was born in Kingston in 1931, the daughter of Jamaican attorney Alfred Wellesley Bourke (after his death, she would marry Henry Fowler) and Greta Bourke (née Todd), an important part of the theatre movement in Jamaica. She gave up her career to become a full-time mother and their first daughter, Deborah was born in January 1953.

Around this time, in October 1954, his second daughter Penelope would be born and from here he went on to make "The Dam Busters" (a lot of his scenes were cut because he was stealing the spotlight apparently. He was on the screen a lot but only had about eight lines), and the London production of "Tiger at the Gates" in June of 1955 as Topman, who comes on in the beginning and reports on what Helen is doing in Troy and says "I can tell the sex of a seagull at thirty yards off". He also made the movie, "Hill in Korea" at this time and said that it was a nice part, that of a simple country boy but to date, he had not been in a good movie. He would take on several jobs to supplement his income as a struggling actor and support his growing family, writing book reviews, working in an ice cream factory, teaching staff and was turned down from an assembly line job for H.J. Heinz in London because he was too well educated. He remembered praying for a job at one point, though he wasn't religious. He made the film "Double Cross" and went on to star in the popular series "The Buccaneers" (1956-57) as Captain Dan Tempest. He liked the swashbuckling and had admired Errol Flynn but he thought the scripts were bad and he couldn't go anywhere in England without being recognized, not as Robert Shaw but as Dan Tempest. He thought of it as a joke as did some of his contemporaries but he earned $10,000 pounds for eight months work. He bought his first car with the money, a yellow and black 1933 Rolls Royce. The week he started filming The Buccaneers, he also had one of his plays produced at the Arts Theatre, "Off The Mainland" which he had written whilst performing in "Tiger at the Gates", based on the Paolo and Francesca story. Shaw had thought it was marvelous but it played to half-empty houses and a friend, Lindsay Anderson, commented that it was bad but had flashes of good writing and that one had to know what one was trying to say. Robert remembered being quite hurt by it.

Remembering that a London manager had said that the first act of one of his plays was written like a novel, he retreated to the country and began to write. With the help of a hundred pound loan from his friend Donald Pleasence, his first novel "The Hiding Place" was published, about two airmen during World War II who are forced to bail and parachute into a small German town. They are then kept prisoners of war in a bomb shelter, even after the war has ended. He got rave reviews for the novel and it even became a film later with Alec Guinness as the lead, titled "Situation Hopeless But Not Serious". Pleasence would later star in the stage production of his novel "The Man in the Glass Booth" a novel he wrote about a rich Jewish businessman named Adolph Eichman who is accused of being a Nazi war criminal. "The Hiding Place" was a success, selling twelve thousand copies in England and about the same in France and in the United States. He also wrote a dramatization of it that was produced on commercial television in England and "Playhouse 90" aired a different dramatization in America. At this point in his career, he was better known as an author than as an actor. As an actor, he felt he had become a joke. People all over England knew him and his name but to the people in power in the theatre, he felt he was nothing. When asked once which he preferred, he said that writing and acting were "opposite ends of the pole. Acting is instant enjoyment and childlike. As an actor, Lord God, I can take an audience in a theatre and throw them in any direction. I can't do that as a writer. Writing is painful, it's lonely and you suffer and there's no immediate feedback."

Things began to look up when he wrote to George Duveen and told him that he admired what he was doing at the Royal Court Theatre. He had an answer within a week, Duveen offering him a part in "Live Like Pigs". He would go on to do two more plays with Duveen, getting along marvelously with him and would perform in "The Long and the Short and the Tall" with Peter O'Toole which was a hit and moved to the West End. He played a sergeant in control of a patrol in Burma.

Around 1959, he became involved with the well-known actress Mary Ure, who was married to the actor John Osborne at the time. He slipped her his telephone number one night at 3 a.m. while visiting the couple and she called him the next day. It was around this time, in 1960, that Robert Shaw became a reporter for England's Queen magazine and covered the Olympics in Rome. Robert Shaw and Mary Ure acted together in Middleton's The Changeling at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1961. He was playing the part of an ugly servant in love with the mistress of the house who persuades him to murder her fiancé. Robert Shaw and Mary Ure had a child on August 31st, even though they were still married to their other spouses. His wife Jennifer and Mary Ure had children to him only weeks apart from each other. Mary divorced John Osborne and married Robert Shaw in April 1963. The couple was often quoted by the press as being, "very much in love" and together, they would have four children together; Colin, Elizabeth, Hannah and Ian. He already had four daughters from his marriage to Jennifer Bourke; Deborah, Penelope, Rachel and Katherine.

Marriage to Mary Ure in 1963

In 1962, he won the highly coveted Hawthornden Prize for his novel "The Sun Doctor" and it was always debatable as to which role he preferred most, that of actor or as an author. When he was asked why he wrote, he was once quoted as saying, "First, because I have a childish desire for immortality...Secondly, I am a political writer. I feel very radically about some things but only in a certain kind of way, not in a square-on political party way." I would like to influence people to a hard and tough radicalism. That is why I admire Orwell so much...I genuinely love to shock my readership into something. But I am always thinking of how I can get their attention, of how I can shock them out of their smug, middle-class ways. I want to shock them out of their stupor, to shock them into awareness, to make them think." He would go on to make three more films, "The Valiant", "Tomorrow at Ten" and "The Caretaker". Filmed during the winter of 1962-63, Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" is one of his most brilliant performances as Aston and his speech about time spent in hospital at the hands of a sadistic doctor is chilling and second only to the Indianapolis monologue in JAWS. Now that I've seen it, I understand what other fans were raving about. Donald Pleasence and Alan Bates are superb but it is Robert Shaw who steals the spotlight as usual. A must for any true Shaw fan, it was filmed in a house in Hackney with financial backing from legends Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Noel Coward and Bond producer Harry Saltzman. Shaw still wasn't a familiar face, but all that would change with the next film, "From Russia with Love" as Donald "Red" Grant, Shaw was unforgettable as the bleach blond Russian assassin from Spectre/SMERSH. According to many film critics, it is one of if not the best Bond, my favourite along with Goldfinger and the favourite of John F. Kennedy's as well as listed in Life Magazine. He was a close friend of Sean Connery and was later quoted as saying, "Sean Connery is a lovely man, a loyal man, a good friend. I feel like a father to him-a funny thing to say about a man of 43, when I'm only 45 myself. If I called Sean right now and said I wanted a million dollars-well, I wouldn't get a million, but I'd get a very large sum."

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