Stephen Haggard
Stephen Hubert Avenel Haggard (21 March 1911 – 25 February 1943) was a British actor, writer and poet.
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Stephen Haggard
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Born | Guatemala City, Guatemala |
21 March 1911
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Egypt |
Cause of death | Suicide |
Resting place | Heliopolis War Cemetery |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | actor, writer, poet, intelligence officer |
Years active | 1930s–1940s |
Contents
Early life
Haggard was born on 21 March 1911 in Guatemala City, Guatemala and was the son of Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard, a British diplomat, and his wife Georgianna Ruel Haggard.[1] He was the grandnephew of author H. Rider Haggard, and the brother of photographer and author Virginia Haggard, the companion of the painter Marc Chagall.[2] He was also the father of the film director Piers Haggard.[1][3] Haggard was educated at Haileybury College, where he became close to the artist-schoolmaster Wilfrid Blunt.[4]
Training and career
After an initial foray into journalism, and determined to obtain some overseas experience,[5] Haggard moved to Munich, where he studied for stage at the Munich State Theatres under Frau Magda Lena.[5] He made his stage debut at the Schauspielhaus in October 1930 in the play Das Kluge Kind directed by Max Reinhardt. He later appeared as Hamlet at the same theatre.[1][5]
Returning to the United Kingdom in 1931, Haggard's career path was initially discouraging: he received only small parts in various London plays and worked in repertory in Worthing.[1] He undertook further study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.[5] and subsequently received good notices when he played Silvius in Shakespeare's As You Like It in London in 1933.[5] He was noticed by the playwright Clemence Dane and Haggard made his first appearance in New York in 1934 as the poet Thomas Chatterton in her play Come of Age.[1][5] Returning to Britain, he had successful roles in a number of plays, including Flowers of the Forest, a production of Mazo de la Roche's Whiteoaks, and he appeared as Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull,[5][6] and was hailed as one of the most promising and handsome classical actors of the era.[7]
Haggard married Morna Gillespie in September 1935, and they had three children, of whom one died young.[1][8][9]
In 1938, Haggard returned to New York to reprise his role as Finch in Whiteoaks, which he also directed.[1][5] His novel Nya was published in the same year.[1] He appeared as Mozart in the film Whom the Gods Love (1936). The film was not a success, in part because Haggard was considered to be inexperienced and unknown. He also appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's film Jamaica Inn (1939)[1][10] and subsequently appeared as Lord Nelson in the Carol Reed film The Young Mr Pitt (1942).[11]
Second World War
At the outbreak of the Second World War Haggard joined the British Army, serving as a captain in the Intelligence Corps.[1] His wife and two sons went to the United States in 1940, where his father was consul-general in New York. Shortly after their departure, he wrote his sons a letter, which was subsequently published in the Atlantic Monthly later that year as "I'll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier's Letter to His Sons."[12] Haggard was posted to the Middle East and worked for the Department of Political Warfare.[6][7] There he met the author Olivia Manning and her husband, the broadcaster R. D. Smith. The latter recruited Haggard to play starring roles in his radio productions of Henry V and Hamlet on local radio in Jerusalem.[6]
Death
While in the Middle East, Haggard fell in love with a beautiful Egyptian married woman whose husband worked in Palestine. Haggard was overworked and felt that the war had destroyed his acting career. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown when after some months the woman decided to end the relationship. Haggard shot himself on a train between Cairo and Palestine on 25 February 1943 at the age of 31.[7][13]
The manner of Haggard's death was hushed up and is not mentioned in the biography of Haggard written by Christopher Hassell and published in 1948.[13] Haggard is buried in Heliopolis War Cemetery, in Cairo, Egypt.[14]
Legacy
Manning based the character Aidan Sheridan in her Fortunes of War novel sequence on Haggard.[7][13]
Selected filmography
- Whom the Gods Love (1936)
Works
- Haggard, S. (1938). Nya. London: Faber & Faber Limited.
- Haggard, S. (1944). I’ll Go to Bed at Noon: A Soldier’s Letter to His Sons. London, Faber and Faber
- Haggard, S. (1945). The Unpublished Poems of Stephen Haggard Salamander Press
- Athene Seyler with Stephen Haggard (1946). The Craft of Comedy. New York : Theatre Arts
References
- Hassall, C. (1948). The Timeless Quest: Stephen Haggard. London: A. Barker.
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External links
- Stephen Haggard at the Internet Broadway DatabaseLua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 28: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
- Stephen Haggard at the Internet Movie Database
- Stephen Haggard at Find a Grave
- EngvarB from August 2014
- Use dmy dates from August 2014
- Pages with broken file links
- Articles with hCards
- 1911 births
- 1943 deaths
- English male actors who committed suicide
- British male stage actors
- British Army personnel of World War II
- British poets
- 20th-century British writers
- Intelligence Corps officers
- People educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College
- People from Guatemala City
- Poets who committed suicide
- Suicides by firearm in Egypt
- Writers who committed suicide
- 20th-century British male actors
- British male film actors
- 20th-century British poets
- British male poets
- Alumni of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art