Anther Nicol Article....

Below article written by Tim Walker.

Barely three months after Inadmissible Evidence, the John Osborne play that made his name, was revived in London, Nicol Williamson has died, aged 73, in Holland.

The colourful Scot – who was described by Osborne as the greatest actor since Marlon Brando, and, by Samuel Beckett, as “touched by genius” – had not made a film since 1997’s superhero picture Spawn. He had, in recent years, been concentrating on music.

His son, Luke, by his former wife Jill Townsend, tells Mandrake that he died just before Christmas after a two-year fight with oesophageal cancer and was eager that no fuss should be made about his passing. To modern filmgoers, he is probably best known for The Exorcist III and for playing Merlin in Excalibur.

John Boorman, the director, cast him in the latter film opposite his former lover Helen Mirren, to the dismay of both actors. The pair had previously appeared together, disastrously, in Macbeth.

Williamson’s rise and fall had been startling. His performance in Inadmissible Evidence in 1964 won him superb reviews in London, and, later, a Tony award on Broadway. Playing the title role in Hamlet for Tony Richardson, he won an unlikely fan in Harold Wilson. Richard Nixon, as president, invited him to the White House on Wilson’s recommendation.

His son says he preferred the company of musicians in his later years after he moved to Amsterdam to escape media attention in the late Seventies. He says he was hoping to put up his father's new album - which may be called "Nine Slices" or "Kismet Once Again", but was undecided - on the website they had set up together. He adds that a cause that was particularly close to his father's heart was the Regional Youth Shakespeare Company of which he was the patron.

Another cherished project in his later years was narrating an audio version of J R R Tolkien's The Hobbit.

Ultimately, acting didn’t seem to mean all that much to Williamson, who died in relative poverty. As he once observed: “Actors act too much.”

Long goodbye

Just as football managers become anxious when their boards pass resolutions of confidence, so a BBC director-general can be forgiven for sweating when he learns that his chairman has headhunters working on a “succession plan”.

Mark Thompson, the current D-G, normally responds to my questions in person. When I ask him what he thinks about what Lord Patten has done, he does not reply, but, chillingly, a BBC press officer responds on his behalf: “As has been made clear, this is sensible succession planning, which Mark fully supports. It does not mean there is a vacancy.”