Year of the Mad King: The Lear Diaries (ePub)

Born in Cape Town, Antony Sher came to London in 1968, and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy. He is now regarded as one of Britain's leading actors, as well as a respected author and artist. Much of his career has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he is an Associate Artist. He has played Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes, Prospero, Shylock, Iago and Falstaff, as well as the leading roles in Cyrano de Bergerac, Tamburlaine the Great, The Roman Actor, Tom Stoppard's Travesties, Peter Flannery's Singer, Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
At the National Theatre he played the title roles in Primo (his own adaptation of Primo Levi's If This is a Man), Pam Gems's Stanley, Brecht's Arturo Ui, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (a co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg), as well as Astrov in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and Jacob in Nicholas Wright's Travelling Light. In the West End, his roles have included Arnold in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, Muhammed in Mike Leigh's Goose-pimples, and Gellburg in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass. He played Freud in Terry Johnson's Hysteria at Bath's Theatre Royal and Hampstead Theatre.
Film and television appearances include Mrs Brown, Alive and Kicking, The History Man, Macbeth and J.G. Ballard's Home.
Following his debut as a writer with Year of the King (1985), an account of playing Richard III, he has written four novels - Middlepost, Indoor Boy, Cheap Lives and The Feast - as well as other theatre journals, Woza Shakespeare! (co-written with his partner, the director Greg Doran) and Primo Time. His autobiography Beside Myself was published in 2001. His plays include I.D. (premiered at the Almeida Theatre, 2003) and The Giant (premiered at Hampstead Theatre, 2007).
He has published a book of his paintings and drawings, Characters (1989), and held exhibitions of his work at the National Theatre, the London Jewish Cultural Centre, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and