Trader Faulkner
TV, film and theatre actor who moved from Australia to the UK and shared the stage with Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh
Although he was the son of the silent-screen star John Faulkner and ballerina Sheila Whytock, who had danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Trader Faulkner had no intention of following his parents on to the stage, intending instead to join the navy in his native Australia.
When the end of the Second World War scuppered his ambition, he found work as a runner with ABC Radio in Sydney, where a chance meeting with the young actor Peter Finch led him to join a theatre group and changed his life.
Faulkner went on to become a popular character actor at home and in the UK, sharing the stage with luminaries such as Laurence Olivier (whom he first met in The School for Scandal at the Tivoli, Sydney in 1948), John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh. He was also an admired champion of Spanish theatre and dance, and the biographer of Finch, whom he described as “a mentor and an elder brother figure”.
Born in Manly, New South Wales, Faulkner earned his nickname when he was discovered stealing his alcoholic father’s illicitly distilled booze and selling it at school. Later it proved an ice-breaker when John Gielgud, appalled that he was called Ronald, was elated to discover the background to his adopted name and cast him to replace Richard Burton in the 1950 Broadway run of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning.
By then Faulkner had established himself as a stalwart of Sydney’s local theatre scene, where he was spotted by Tyrone Guthrie on a visit to see The Merry Wives of Windsor (in which Faulkner was a decidedly eccentric Dr Caius) at the city’s Independent Theatre in 1948. Guthrie subsequently encouraged him to try his luck in Britain.
Faulkner arrived in London and in 1952 he reunited with Gielgud for Much Ado About Nothing at the Phoenix, the following year playing the Earl of Westmorland opposite John Neville’s Henry V at the Bristol Old Vic.
In 1954 he was seen in Peter Hall’s Blood Wedding at the Arts Theatre before joining the Stratford Memorial Theatre company to play Sebastian, twin to Vivien Leigh’s Viola, in Twelfth Night, alongside Olivier’s Malvolio in 1955.
The same year he played Malcolm to the star couple’s Macbeths and Fenton to Anthony Quayle’s Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The Stage found him “outstanding” as Gaston in Jean Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors, directed by Hall at London’s Arts Theatre (1956), during which he was also appearing in a flamenco-accented midnight cabaret at the Royal Court.
Television and film commitments curtailed his theatre activity during much of the 1960s, but he was a notable Geralde in Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid (Vaudeville, London, 1968) and translated and directed Alejandro Casona’s The Cudgelled Cuckold in a double-bill with Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy at the Lyric, Belfast (1969).
He spent 1970 with the Royal Shakespeare Company, notably as Elbow (Measure for Measure), Antonio (The Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Bernardo to Alan Howard’s Hamlet.
A regular promoter and performer of Spanish dance and theatre – for which he received Spain’s Order of Civil Merit in 1985 – he provided the translation to Nuria Espert’s Spanish-spoken Divinas Palabras for the National Theatre in 1977.
His widely toured one-man show Lorca, An Evocation about the dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca, was first seen at London’s Lyric, Hammersmith in 1986. It ended its long life on the road with performances at the Lilian Baylis Theatre, London in 1994.
A second, autobiographical, one-man show devised by John Goodwin, Losing My Marbles, debuted in London’s Jermyn Street Theatre in 1999.
On film, he appeared with John Mills (Mr Denning Drives North, 1951), Laurence Harvey (A Killer Walks, 1952) and Anthony Quinn (A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965).
His television credits included the first series of Our House, featuring Carry On stars Hattie Jacques, Joan Sims and Charles Hawtrey (1960), Prince John in Richard the Lionheart (1962) and the Maureen Lipman comedy vehicle About Face (1989).
In later years he wrote prolifically for titles as diverse as The Stage, Tatler and, regularly, the Oldie. He published a memoir, Inside Trader, co-written with William Roberts, in 2012.
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner was born on September 7, 1927, and died on April 14, aged 93.
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