Obituary: John McEnery, troubled actor best known for Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet

Died: April 12, 2019

JOHN McEnery, who has died aged 75, had a glittering stage career, working with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in the 1960s and Trevor Nunn at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s. With his blue eyes, mop of blond hair and an air of danger about him, McEnery also had a brief shot at film stardom, but wound up living in a hostel and acting in a former asylum.

Like so many actors of his generation, McEnery was a hellraiser and struggled to control his drinking. He was unpredictable – on one occasion he was arrested by armed police after pulling out a water pistol in a pub when he was refused a drink. He said he was looking for a pen.

And there is a feeling that he never quite fulfilled the potential he showed as the ill-fated Mercutio in Franco Zeffirelli’s youthful 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet, which was a big popular success.

The youngest of three brothers, John Murray McEnery was born in Walsall, near Birmingham. His father owned a pickle factory, but sold up and moved to Brighton, where he opened several stationary shops. McEnery’s eldest brother David was a photographer and his middle brother Peter is also an actor.

McEnery worked in a department store before training with the Bristol Old Vic in the early 1960s and then joining Liverpool’s newly formed Everyman Theatre, where contemporaries included Stephanie Beacham. They were married for much of the 1970s, though the union ended in divorce.

He played Hamlet in the original 1967 London production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and reprised the role at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh the following year.

He had already visited Scotland with the National in 1966 when he appeared at the King’s in Glasgow in The Royal Hunt of the Sun with a cast that included Anthony Hopkins and Derek Jacobi. And he played Costard in the National’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the King’s in Edinburgh in 1969.

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet brought McEnery a Bafta nomination and opened the door to film stardom. He landed the title role in the drama Bartleby (1970), but it flopped badly. He was Kerensky in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), he starred in the Conan Doyle dinosaur adventure The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and he co-starred with Jane Seymour in the BBC adaption of Our Mutual Friend (1976).

But his most notable work was undoubtedly on stage, with the National, RSC and more recently working with Mark Rylance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, where he won acclaim as the Fool in a production of Lear in 2001.

It was suggested in court that he was simply playing the Fool again when he waved a water pistol around in two pubs in Kent in 2017. He was cleared of producing an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

McEnery struggled with alcoholism, he had been living in a hostel and he had rarely worked in recent years. He did play Lear in a performance described as “moving but unsentimental” in a production in the former Peckham Asylum in 2015.

At the time of the court case he was bearded, somewhat wizened and he had been living on a converted trawler. He said the water pistol was for shooting insects. He is survived by two daughters.

BRIAN PENDREIGH