Nicol Williamson has passed away. Published reports say that the Scottish actor died just before Christmas in Amsterdam of oesophageal cancer. He was 75.
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The name may not be familiar to everyone, but it is a pretty good bet that you saw him in something. In the movies, he was a cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Percent Solution. Merlin in Excalibur. Little John in Robin and Marian. He played Hamlet and Macbeth, numerous times each. He acted in the plays of Tom Stoppard, Anton Chekhov, John Osborne, and Neil Simon. And he was noted for being a tempestuous, mercurial, erratic and often inebriated performer who once, while playing the ghost of John Barrymore in a play called “I Hate Hamlet,” he stabbed one of his fellow actors with a sword, prompting the other actor to walk off-stage mid-performance and quit.
In short, you couldn’t take your eyes off him when he was performing - sometimes it was going to be a gorgeous artwork, and sometimes a car wreck. At least, I couldn’t ... and I saw him a couple of times on stage, and Robin and Marian is one of my favorite movies.
