Year of the King

Born in Cape Town, Antony Sher came to London in 1968, and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy. He is now regarded as one of Britain's leading actors, as well as a respected author and artist. Much of his career has been with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he is an Honorary Associate Artist. He has played Richard III, Macbeth, Leontes, Prospero, Shylock, Iago and Falstaff, as well as the leading roles in Cyrano de Bergerac, Tamburlaine the Great, The Roman Actor, Tom Stoppard's Travesties, Peter Flannery's Singer, Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye, and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

At the National Theatre he played the title roles in Primo (his own adaptation of Primo Levi's If This is a Man) and Pam Gems's Stanley. In the West End, his roles have included Arnold in Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, Muhammed in Mike Leigh's Goose- Pimples, and Gellburg in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass. He played Freud in Terry Johnson's Hysteria at Bath's Theatre Royal and Hampstead Theatre.

Film and television appearances include Mrs Brown, Alive and Kicking, The History Man, Macbeth, Primo and J. G. Ballard's Home.

He has written four novels - Middlepost, Indoor Boy, Cheap Lives and The Feast - as well as the theatre journals, Year of the Fat Knight, Year of the King, Woza Shakespeare! (co-written with his partner, the director Gregory Doran), Primo Time and his autobiography, Beside Myself. His plays include I. D. (Almeida Theatre, 2003) and The Giant (Hampstead Theatre, 2007).

He has published a book of his paintings and drawings, Characters (1989), and held exhibitions of his work at the National Theatre, the London Jewish Cultural Centre, the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and the Herbert Gallery in Coventry. Among numerous awards, he has won the Olivier Best Actor Award on two occasions (Richard III/Torch Song Trilogy and Stanley), the Evening Standard Best Actor Award (Richard III), the Evening Standard Peter Sellers Film Award (for Disraeli in Mrs Brown) and the Critics' Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance (for Falstaff). On Broadway, he won Best Solo Performer in both the Outer Critics' Circle and Drama Desk Awards for em>Primo. In 2000 he was knighted for his services to acting and writing.