Sir Antony Sher was one of the great Jewish actors of our time. But he was also a gifted artist and a fine writer, perhaps best known for a series of books about playing some of his most famous roles, from Richard III to Lear and Falstaff.
This new book is really two books in one. The first, and by far the best, is Sher’s Dying Diaries, his account of his last months as he died of liver cancer, intercut with the account of these harrowing months by his partner of 35 years and the former director of the RSC, Gregory Doran. The rest of the book consists of Doran’s account of his grief-stricken quest to track down as many of the extant copies of Shakespeare’s First Folios as possible.
Sher was diagnosed with cancer in June 2021 and began, quietly, to write a journal about his experience. A month after his funeral Doran found Sher’s “diary of dying”. It is an extraordinarily moving account that takes him from the first diagnosis of his cancer until five days before his death. The silence at the end is desperately sad.
It begins on June 9, 2021 when Sher received a phone call from his doctor. He had the results of Sher’s ultrasound scan. Sher had primary liver cell cancer. Neither Sher nor his doctors expected his cancer to develop so rapidly. The diary is not just about his illness but also how badly the NHS can let down someone with a terminal illness. And then there is the growing humiliation of catheters and nappies. Sher’s world shrinks from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to his bedroom and finally to his death bed.
Above all, comes the awful realisation that “dying means actual dying”. “Writing this diary is becoming harder and harder. My shaking hand, my weak eyesight.” His decline accelerates. Will the full moon be his last? As he reaches November, he wonders if he will survive the month. On November 16 he writes “loss of memory”. “[T]here is nothing to be done,” he writes despairingly. “I have no options.” He loses his voice and hearing. He fights against growing immobility. The sense of loneliness is overwhelming. On November 27, Sher writes his last entry. He died on December 2.
Doran writes, “In the living room the clock on the mantelpiece struck midnight. ‘We have heard the chimes of midnight, Master Shallow.’” It is one of Shakespeare’s greatest lines, spoken by Falstaff in Henry IV Part 2 and delivered by Sher for the RSC in 2014 when he was still at his prime. A few years later he gave his final performance, in the play Kunene and the King at the Ambassadors Theatre in London. At the end of the run he leaves the theatre. “Little do I know,” he writes, “that I will never return to the stage door, or this theatre, or any theatre, and I will never work as an actor again.”
Walking Shadow: Love, Loss and Shakespeare by Greg Doran is published by Bloomsbury.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.