John Neville died this week. Film cultists know him for his Lord Buckley-esque Baron Munchausen in Terry Gilliam’s follow-up to Brazil.
TV cultists know Neville as the manicured man on The X-File (a role he repeated in one of the show’s movie spin-offs).
Canadian summer theater festival cultists know him as the former artistic director of the Stratford Theatre Festival.
And suckers, such as myself, for nationally touring musicals that don’t replicate recent Broadway productions recall him as Henry Higgins in the 30th anniversary tour of My Fair Lady. The show played New Haven’s Shubert Theatre in the fall of 1991. The original Broadway production of My Fair Lady had its out-of-town try-outs at the selfsame Shubert in 1956.
The tour was directed and choreographed by Crandall Diehl, though Neville had staged and starred in his own production of the show at Stratford eight years earlier. The cast included Christine Andreas as Eliza, Clive Revill as her father Alfred P. Doolittle, John Valentine as Colonel Pickering and Kevin Dearinger as Freddy. The production was notable for how respectful it was of the original production. Read the libretto sometime and you’ll realize how much cut of the book (and even a few of the songs) regional and community productions routinely chop out of My Fair Lady. Considering that what’s being cut is basically verbatim George Bernard Shaw dialogue from Pygmalion, it’s significant.
As was John Neville, who could sing Higgin’s lines when he felt like it, and brought an air of Shaw himself to his performance. Actors who can really embody the arch attitude of the old British empire are pretty much all gone now. John Neville was one of them.
Thanks for remembering Johnny Neville. He was a very nice man, a wonderful colleague, and a great actor.