So it’s not surprising that Warner didn’t receive any awards until the 1980s, when he earned a Primetime Emmy for his supporting role as Pomponius Falco in the TV miniseries “Masada.” Warner would, however, go on to work with great film directors like John Frankenheimer ( “ The Fixer”), Joseph Losey ( “A Doll’s House”), and Sidney Lumet ( “The Sea Gull”). Some critics sniffed at Warner’s performance since Morgan was obviously meant to speak to (or simply about) his disaffected generation. Time Magazine celebrated Warner’s performance by saying that, as Morgan, Warner “catches every kink and twitch of a natural misfit who can only sense progress when he is swimming against the stream.”
In the movie, Warner plays the title character, a mischievous angry young man who continually tries to prevent his ex-wife ( Vanessa Redgrave) from remarrying. Warner also notably starred in “Morgan-A Suitable Case for Treatment,” a 1966 film adaptation of David Mercer’s stage play. Speaking of Warner’s Hamlet, theater critic Ronald Bryden writes: “This is a Hamlet desperately in need of counsel, help, experience, and he actually seeks it from the audience in his soliloquies.” Bryden adds that “ Hamlet communes not with himself, but with you.” Warner characteristically accepts praise for his performance by shying away from it: “I don’t know whether I learnt a great deal about Hamlet, but I learnt an awful lot about myself.” Still, Warner’s neurotic line delivery and manic energy came to personify Hall’s production. He’s a Prince at one moment, and an ordinary man the next.” Warner is also quick to note that the “ordinary” qualities that he brought to his role didn’t originate with him, but rather came about “very slowly” and “intuitively.” “I never went into it with any preconceptions, or thought about it before,” Warner adds before noting that Hamlet was never a role that he had hoped to play. I think modern, younger audiences appreciate this Hamlet, because it has the nasty side as well as the sympathetic side. “It was just that people labelled it as that. “I didn’t really think of it as a Hamlet for our time,” Warner responds. He was passive, yet had an anarchic wit.” Hall says that he cast a then-unknown Warner because he was looking for a performer who could speak to his generation’s “disillusionment, which produces an apathy of will so deep that commitment to politics, religion or life is impossible.” In Jonathan Croall’s comprehensive Performing Hamlet, Hall describes Warner as “the very embodiment of the 1960s student-tall, blond, gangling. He was directed by Peter Hall, who had previously worked with Warner when he played Henry VI in Edward IV, Henry VI, and Richard III at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964. Warner’s breakout performance as Hamlet was a major milestone for the insatiable performer. “My first job was as an extra” he tells Harris, referring to his first film role as a sailor in “We Joined the Navy.” That was in 1962, the same year that Warner made his acting debut at the Royal Court Theatre as Tom Snout in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Warner also didn’t always consider acting to be his great calling in life, as he joked with The AV Club’s Will Harris during a characteristically exhaustive interview. He was not a celebrated student, as Warner sometimes recalled during interviews, so his acceptance at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) was never a given. Warner was born on July 29 th, 1941 in Manchester, England his parents divorced when he was a child, so he attended eight separate boarding schools while they “kept stealing me from each other,” according to Warner.
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