Maurice Evans

At 87 years old, Maurice Evans physical status not available right now. We will update Maurice Evans's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Maurice Herbert Evans (3 June 1901 – 12 March 1989) was an English actor, noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters.

His best-known screen roles are Dr.

Zaius in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and as Samantha Stephens's father, Maurice, on Bewitched.

Early years

Evans was born at 28 Icen Way in Dorchester, Dorset. He was the son of Laura (Turner) and Alfred Herbert Evans, a Welsh dispensing chemist and keen amateur actor who made adaptations of novels by Thomas Hardy for the local amateur company. Young Maurice made his first stage appearance as a small boy in Far from the Madding Crowd.

He first appeared on the stage in 1926 at the Cambridge Festival Theatre and joined the Old Vic Company in 1934, playing Hamlet, Richard II, and Iago. He was selected by Terence Gray to appear in the opening production in November 1926 at the Festival Theatre, taking the part of Orestes in two parts of the sensational production of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This was followed by Lord Belvoir in The Man Who Ate the Popomack by W. J. Turner, and Saint Anthony in Maeterlinck's The Miracle of Saint Anthony.

In 1927, Evans played a poet in The Pleasure Garden by Beatrice Mayor followed by Young Man in On Baile's Strand by W. B. Yeats, Midir in The Immortal Hour by Fiona Macleod, the Hon. Algernon Moodie in The Rumour by C.K. Munro, Mark Ingestire in Sweeney Todd by Dibdin Pitt, the poet in The Lost Silk Hat by Lord Dunsany, the Captain in Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw, Mister Four and Young Man in The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, Don Juan in the play of the same title by James Elroy Flecker, two parts in Terence Gray's own play The Red Nights of the Tcheka, the Stage Manager in The Player Queen (also by Yeats), the Second Engineer in The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers, Prince Kamose in another Gray play called And in the Tomb, and finally in June 1927, Don Pelegari in Pirandello's Each In His Own Way. Both Yeats and Shaw attended performances of their own plays.

Personal life

Although he had taken U.S. citizenship in 1941, Evans had returned to Britain by the end of the 1960s. Aside from an infrequent trip to the United States and occasional visits to retired actors in financial need (as a representative of the Actors' Fund, of which he was a longtime trustee), he lived quietly near Brighton. He never married, and was survived by a brother, Hugh, of London.

Source

Career

He was one of a group of out-of-work actors, including Laurence Olivier, who was given a "tryout" of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End in 1927, and later in 1929 at the Savoy Theatre, which had been rented by Chicago theatre manager Maurice Browne. It was a huge success, running for two years and gaining Maurice's name. He starred as the young officer Raleigh, who died at the end of the play. He went to the Old Vic Theatre in 1934, where his production of Shakespeare's Richard II was highly praised. He had been invited to Katharine Cornell in the United States as a result of this. Falstaff's debut on Broadway was in Romeo and Juliet opposite Katharine Cornell in 1936, but it became his first appearance on Broadway in Richard II (1939), Twelfth Night (1942) (the first time that the play was presented uncut on the New York stage) by Stephen Barrett), In the 1935 version of George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan, he appeared opposite Cornell.

He enlisted in the United States Army and later became in charge of an Army Entertainment Section in the Central Pacific as the United States entered the Second World War. Carl Reiner was moved from the Signal Corps to the entertainment unit in Hawaii, where Major Evans was his commanding officer. Hundreds of shows were put on for the troops in the Pacific by the unit. Reiner later hired Evans for the role of Hobart the butler in The Jerk, as Evans' agent had predicted that the job would enable Evans to keep his union pensions.

Evans created his famous "G.I." Hamlet's version" of the play that simplified the text to make the title character more appealing to the troops, which later brought it to Broadway in 1945. By the time of the war, Evans had risen to the rank of Major. In The Apple Cart, he turned to Shaw's works, particularly as John Tanner in Man and Superman and King Magnus. In 1952, he appeared as the murderous husband in Dial M for Murder, the first Broadway stage production. He also produced Broadway plays in which he did not appear, including The Teahouse of the August Moon.

Evans' LP of Winnie-the-Pooh stories was released in 1956. On the sitcom Bewitched, American television audiences of the 1960s will recall Evans as Samantha's father, Maurice. His real-life request that his first name be pronounced "Morris" was at odds with his Bewitched character's contrasting position that it be pronounced "Maw-REESE." Evans appeared in the fourth season of Daniel Boone, with Fess Parker as the French impresario "Beaumarchais." In 1966, Heard appeared in The Puzzler on Batman in a double episode storyline (which was common for that series) on CBS. He appeared in "The Big Valley" from the latter half of the fourth and final season of the American television series "Danger Road" in April 1969.

Evans had a great effect on the big screen as well. In Kind Lady (1951), he played a diabolical villain (co-starring Ethel Barrymore, Keenan Wynn, and Angela Lansbury); Emperor Antoninus in Androcles and the Lion (1952); and Sir Arthur Sullivan in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953). In two 1968 films, Evans played memorably as Dr. Zaius, the evolving orangutan (and the 1970 sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes) and the doomed "Hutch," the title character on Rosemary Woodhouse's Baby, who tells her neighbor, Rosemary Woodhouse, of the true Satanic nature of her neighbors, Roman and Minnie Castavet (played by Sidney Blackman and Ruth Gordon).

They were:

Evans was a true pioneer in bringing so much Shakespeare to American television in such a short period of time (between 1953 and 1960). This had never been tried before, at least not in the United States, but not in the United States. He firmly believed that it was an actor's job to "lead public opinion, not to play to public opinion."

Evans performed Hamlet on the Great White Way in four separate productions for a total of 283 performances. Dame Judith Anderson and he appeared in Macbeth numerous times. Their performances were widely believed to be the definitive portrayals of these characters, though Orson Welles, one of the few notable critics, said Evans, who was "worse than bad," in his remarks.

Evans appeared on Broadway four times as Hamlet, but the productions of the play in which he appeared were consecutive re-runs of it – no other actor appeared on Broadway between 1938, when Evans first appeared on Broadway, and 1946, which marked Evans' last Broadway Hamlet appearance. He is unquestionably the only actor to have attempted this, so far.

Source