Michael Pennington
Michael Pennington was a theatre man who took screen work rather than the other way round. With the director Michael Bogdanov he founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 and served as its joint artistic director until 1992. He was an honorary associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he directed in Britain and abroad, and he wrote ten books, which is not a normal number for an actor.
1983 explains the split better than any summary could. That year he played Posthumus in Cymbeline, a lead in one of Shakespeare's strangest late plays, and the Imperial officer Moff Jerjerrod in Return of the Jedi. Only one of those brings people to this page.
The screen career afterwards was occasional and tended towards men with authority and paperwork: Richard Siegler in State of Play (2003), Michael Foot in The Iron Lady (2011), a judge in The Escape Artist (2013), and Marcus in the horror film Fragile (2005), which is the outlier.
Our catalog can show you seven credits. It cannot show you the Shakespeare, the directing or the books, and that is where the weight of the career actually sits. Any honest page about him has to say so.
Movies (4)
TV (3)
Where to start with Michael Pennington
Most visitors arrive through Return of the Jedi, where Moff Jerjerrod is a few scenes of impeccable British disdain. Enjoy it, then go somewhere the material deserves him.
That somewhere is Cymbeline, made the same year, where he takes a lead in one of Shakespeare's least tractable plays and does not flinch at it. It is the single best record of what he actually did for a living.
State of Play is the finest drama on the list and worth your time regardless of the size of his part. The Iron Lady gives him Michael Foot inside a film preoccupied with someone else, and The Escape Artist and Fragile are for completists working through the whole record.