Kenneth William Michael Haigh (25 March 1931 – 4 February 2018) was an English actor. He first came to public recognition for playing the role of Jimmy Porter in the play Look Back in Anger in 1956 opposite Mary Ure in London's West End theatre. Haigh's performance in the role on stage was critically acclaimed as a prototype dramatic working-class anti-hero in post-Second World War English drama.
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Early life
Born in Mexborough, West Riding of Yorkshire, Haigh studied drama at the Central School of Speech and Drama, which at the time was based at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Career
He played the central role of Jimmy Porter in the premiere production of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre. Haigh's performance in a 1958 Broadway theatre production of that play so moved one young woman in the audience that she mounted the stage and slapped him in mid-performance.
For the film version released in 1959, he was passed over in favour of Richard Burton. Haigh went on to portray the explorer and adventurer Richard Francis Burton in the BBC production of The Search for the Nile. He also briefly appeared in the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night (1964), uncredited. His other major historical roles were as Brutus in Cleopatra and starring as Napoleon in Eagle in a Cage.
Later he portrayed Joe Lampton – a character created by John Braine in the novel Room at the Top – in the television series Man at the Top (1970–72) and its eponymous spin-off film (1973). Haigh also released an LP in 1973, titled How to Handle a Woman. That same year, in the role as Mr. Barnet in the Wessex Tales episode "Fellow Townsmen", Haigh portrayed a sufferer of fictional misfortune that would later echo his last years of his own life that imitated the tragic irony a Thomas Hardy story.
Haigh made occasional guest appearances on television; for some, the most recognisable is that of time-travelling Flight Lieutenant William Terrence Decker, in the Twilight Zone episode "The Last Flight" (1960). He had already played, three years earlier, another pilot, in High Flight, and had portrayed Pat Casey in Lionel Bart's Maggie May.
Personal life
Haigh married the West Indies model Myrna Stephens in 1974. They divorced in 1985, but remained good friends; she nursed him through his final years of ill health.
Death
Haigh died on 4 February 2018, aged 86. He had spent his last years in a nursing home after oxygen deprivation led to brain damage in 2003, following his accidental swallowing of a bone in a restaurant in Soho.