Margaret Tyzack and Derek Jacobi have been crowned Best Actress and Actor at the Laurence Olivier Awards 2009.
The pair won for their performances in two Donmar Warehouse productions. Tyzack fought off competition from her co-star Penelope Wilton to pick up the Best Actress prize for her performance in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, which played at the Covent Garden venue led by Michael Grandage in June last year. Jacobi won Best Actor for his portrayal of Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the second production in the Donmar Warehouse’s West End season at the Wyndham’s theatre, where it ended its run just last night.
Tyzack’s win completes a hat trick of awards for her performance as the eccentric Mrs St Maugham in The Chalk Garden. The veteran actress shared the Best Actress Evening Standard Theatre Award with Wilton at the beginning of the awards season last November and was subsequently named Best Actress by the Critics’ Circle in January. This is Tyzack’s second Laurence Olivier Award; she won Actress of the Year in a Revival in 1981 for Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? at the National Theatre.
“It’s great isn’t it, it’s a thrill. I didn’t think I’d be as thrilled as I am. I’m so pleased for Michael [Grandage] too because he took a big chance to put on The Chalk Garden,” Tyzack told Official London Theatre.
Tyzack, who is soon to appear in Phaedre opposite Helen Mirren at the National Theatre, said she wanted to thank the Awards panel, who she forgot to mention in her acceptance speech. “When you get up there you hyperventilate even though you thought you were as cool as a cucumber! I took so long to get there! You pass people’s smiling faces, even those you know who hate you! It’s really funny.”
Best Actor winner Jacobi has also previously won a Laurence Olivier Award, for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Cyrano De Bergerac at the Barbican in 1983, a year before the awards were named after Olivier. Following an emotional acceptance speech in which he spoke of the great man, who was both friend and mentor to Jacobi earlier in his career, he told Official London Theatre: “He’s somebody I owe so much, my career owes so much to. His generosity, his faith in me. So to win an award in his name is very special.”
Of his role in Twelfth Night Jacobi said: “I truly did not expect to win because, in a sense, Malvolio is a very important of Twelfth Night but he is not the star of the show, he’s not the biggest part in the show, so I thought I’d be up for Best Supporting Actor, but this is lovely! It’s a bonus!
The esteemed actor has been nominated on a further four occasions, for productions of Ivanov, Hamlet, Breaking The Code and, in 2006, Don Carlos, directed by Michael Grandage, who also directed him in Twelfth Night.
In claiming the Best Actor award, Jacobi triumphed over David Bradley and Michael Gambon, both nominated for Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, and Adam Godley for his performance in Rain Man. In addition to Wilton, Tyzack was nominated alongside Lindsay Duncan for That Face and Deanna Dunagan for August: Osage County.
Veteran actress Sian Phillips, who presented the award to Jacobi, said “Derek and I go back a long way, I played his grandmother in I, Claudius.”
Following Twelfth Night, the Donmar West End season continues with Judi Dench and Frances Barber in Madame De Sade, which begins previews on 13 March, while the home venue presents Athol Fugard’s Dimetos from 19 March.
CB
