Emery Battis, Veteran Shakespeare Actor, Dead at 96

I can’t say I know much about Dr. Battis, but his resume is impressive to say the least and I felt that his contributions to our beloved playwright deserved a little recognition. Dr. Battis died this past weekend due to complications from bladder cancer.

Read the whole obituary to get the full span of this man’s achievements – I’ll list only a few here:

He played more than 90 characters in Shakespearean plays and,
he often noted, had only one onstage kiss in his life.
He worked at
Baltimore’s Centerstage before moving in 1984 to Washington, where he
appeared in almost 70 productions of the Shakespeare Theatre. He
received a Helen Hayes Award for his lifetime contributions to
Washington theater in 2002.
Dr. Battis
acted in all but one of Shakespeare’s 37 plays — the lone exception was
“Cymbeline” — and gave his final performance as Marcade in a 2006
production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” in the Bard’s home town of
Stratford-upon-Avon in England
Battis’s
Falstaff, one critic wrote, “was all that Shakespeare wrote the
character to be: braggart, glutton, coward, liar, obscene buffoon, yet
blessed with an indomitable spirit and an ability to laugh at himself.”
After a 1967 performance in Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer
proclaimed Dr. Battis’s interpretation “the best Lear of our
generation.”