Posted on 01/21/2015 9:44:31 AM PST by Timber Rattler
Veteran actor Brian Blessed collapsed on stage with an apparent heart problem while playing King Lear. The 78-year-old had just started delivering his lines at the start of the Shakespearean tragedy when he fainted, toppled off a raised platform and fell heavily, his crown rolling to a halt at the front of the stage.
Fellow actor Noel White, playing the Earl of Kent, announced quietly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is not part of the play. Is there a doctor in the house?’
Indeed there was. A barely conscious Mr Blessed, flat on his back and surrounded by worried cast members including his daughter Rosalind, was examined by a local surgeon who was attending the show in Guildford on Monday night.
After five minutes Mr Blessed was helped off stage, the audience clapping with relief that the big-voiced sometime star of Z Cars was still alive.
We presumed that would be the end of the evening. We presumed wrongly. You cannot keep an old pro’ down for long and Mr Blessed is of the ‘show must go on’ school.
After being given a cup of sweetened tea, he returned to the stage after 20 minutes to apologise to the final-preview audience for the interruption. ‘I feel such an idiot and am not in the habit of doing this, but I have a little fibrillation,’ he said.
Despite waves of dizziness and such shortness of breath that he rolled his eyes and occasionally clutched his chest, he then resumed what soon became one of the more remarkable and moving renditions of Lear of all time.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
He’s a great actor, I hope to get the chance see him perform live.
He was Augustus in “I, Claudius”.
Wow that was the only way for him to lower his VOLUME!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfG9ddaSJTQ
Loved him in Flash Gordon
I blame Livia Drusilla and the poisoned figs.
He was also good as Richard IV in Black Adder I.
Not so much as Boss Nass in Star Wars I.
“Now is the summer of our sweet content...”
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