Actor Nicol Williamson died 16 December 2011 of esophageal cancer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he had been living for two decades. Born in Hamilton, Scotland, on 14 September 1936, he grew up in England. His son, Luke, announced his death on Nicol's web site yesterday, noting "Nicol was a very private man, he didn’t want people to know that he was ill, he was hoping very much to come out the other side of his battle with 'Seamus the Squamous' and bring some awareness to the plight of children suffering from the horrors of cancer in all its various forms." To that end, he suggests "If anyone would like to express their love or appreciation of Nicol, I would ask them to make a donation in his name—however small—to a charity for children suffering from cancer or other life threatening illnesses."
Williamson was nominated for a Saturn Award for his role as Merlin in the 1981 film Excalibur. He was also nominated three times for BAFTA Awards: in 1969 as Best Actor for The Bofors Gun, the following year for the same award, for Inadmissible Evidence, and in 1973 as Best TV Actor for The Gangster Show: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. As a stage actor, he earned Tony nominations for best actor in 1966 (for Inadmissible Evidence) and 1974 (for Uncle Vanya). He won Drama Desk Awards in 1969 for Hamlet and 1974 for Uncle Vanya, and was nominated again in 1976 for Rex.
As a youth, he served in the British Army, and then left home in 1960 to become an actor, joining the Dundee Repertory Company and later the Royal Court in London, where he began garnering acclaim, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The New York Times says "His career-making role was Bill Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence, a grueling part in a grueling play about a middle-aged lawyer whose life is in tatters. It opened at the Royal Court in 1964 and on Broadway in 1965, where the play had a lukewarm reception but Mr. Williamson a welcoming one; he was nominated for a Tony Award. He reprised the role Off Broadway in 1981." The Times also describes him as "a Scottish-born actor whose large, renegade talent made him a controversial Hamlet, an eccentric Macbeth, an angry, high-strung Vanya and, on the screen, a cocaine-sniffing Sherlock Holmes—and whose querulous temperament could make his antics as commanding as his performances."
He jumped back and forth between stage and film acting, but his career declined in the late 1990s.
His genre roles include: Spawn (1997), Mr. Toad's Wild Ride (1996), The Exorcist III (1990), Return to Oz (1985), Excalibur (1981), Venom (1981), and Le moine (1972).
He was married once, to Jill Townsend, in the early 1970s, and is survived by his son from that marriage.
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