A voice you place before the face, and a career spent being the senator, the general or the father in the second row of the cast list. John Shrapnel was the kind of actor films depend on and reviews, including ours, forget to mention.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in Gladiator (2000) the Senate meets, and among the togas is a man you know by the voice before you can put a name to the face. John Shrapnel plays Gaius, one of the senators conspiring against the emperor. He does what he did on screen for the best part of five decades: he arrives already in charge, speaks as though he has been speaking in that room for thirty years, and lets the film get on with its stars. We scored Gladiator 84 and did not give him a sentence. We scored The Duchess (2008), in which he plays General Grey, 66, and did not give him one there either. That is what the parts were for.
The weight of the career went on stage. He began professionally in 1965, out of Cambridge, joined Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and from the late 1960s took the big classical parts: Creon in the Theban plays, for the BBC in 1986 and the RSC in 1992, and Claudius in the RSC Hamlet of 1992 opposite Kenneth Branagh. He worked repeatedly with Jonathan Miller, on stage and on television, and with Deborah Warner and Adrian Noble. Critics kept saying the same thing about his Creon, that he made a ruler who would not bend into a man with reasons, and that is the quality the screen borrowed from him in small doses.
On film he was, from the early 1970s onward, the establishment. Skinner, the taxidermist in 101 Dalmatians (1996), is the exception, a cruel part people remember. Otherwise he is the PR chief managing Julia Roberts in Notting Hill (1999), Nestor among the old kings in Troy (2004), the general in The Duchess. These roles are written to be trusted and then forgotten. We will admit that watching The Duchess we were looking at Ralph Fiennes, and watching Gladiator at Russell Crowe, and we felt a little ashamed, on reading our own reviews back, to find Shrapnel absent from both. We treated him as part of the set, which is what the parts asked him to be.
The one performance the notices turned on was Aleister Crowley in Chemical Wedding (2008), a lead, and a large one: a critic called it the hammiest thing he had seen. We have not seen it and will not judge it, but an actor built for the second row does not always know what to do with the first.
His last stage part, in 2015, was Salter in Caryl Churchill's A Number at the Young Vic, a father, opposite his son Lex Shrapnel. "I've played them all," he said once, of comedy, farce and tragedy. He had. Most of them were the man at the head of the table. Next time you watch Gladiator, look at the senators. The one you believe is him.
Biography
John Morley Shrapnel (1942–2020) was an English actor known for his stage work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, as well as numerous film and television appearances.
He trained at the City of London School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and began his professional career in 1965. His film roles included Senator Gaius in Gladiator (2000), Nestor in Troy (2004), Mr Skinner in 101 Dalmatians (1996) and the PR Chief in Notting Hill (1999). On television he played Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dunning in the series Between the Lines (1992) and appeared in productions such as Elizabeth R (1971) and Midsomer Murders.
Shrapnel was married to Francesca Ann Bartley from 1975 until his death; they had three sons, including actor Lex Shrapnel.
