Husband Montague Haltrecht
Queer Places:
Denville Hall, 62 Duck's Hill Rd, London, Northwood HA6 2SB, UK
Nicholas Amer, born Thomas Harold Amer (29 September 1923 – 17 November 2019[1]), was an English stage, film and television actor known for his performances in William Shakespeare's plays. Amer made his professional debut in 1948 playing the part of Ferdinand in The Tempest. In his long career, Amer played more than 27 different Shakespearean roles and toured to 31 different countries.
Marriage and family life had never been an option as Amer believed that it would kill his dream of devoting his life to Shakespeare. In 1965, after his second overseas tour, Amer went to the Old Vic to see the Berliner Ensemble perform The Little Mahagonny. It was there at the after-show party that he met up again with Montague Haltrecht, the man who would become his life partner, a Jewish prize-winning novelist and a BAFTA nominee. They had first met each other briefly eight years earlier while Amer was appearing in Love for Love at the Theatre Royal, Windsor in 1957. They decided to live together, and in September 2003, following the setting up of the London Partnerships Register by Ken Livingstone two years earlier, Britain's first register for same-sex couples, they decided to join. Six years later, after the law governing same-sex couples changed as a result of the government's passing of the Civil Partnership Act 2004, they decided to take advantage of the new law.
Amer was born in Tranmere, Birkenhead, Cheshire. He served for five years during World War II in the Royal Navy as a wireless operator aboard Motor Torpedo Boats, first in North Africa, then in the Allied invasion of Sicily, where he was wounded in action. Following demobilisation in 1945, he studied at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in London for two years, winning the Webber Cup in his final year. He adopted the stage name Nicholas Amer and joined the Liverpool Playhouse under John Fernald. Together with Harold Lang, in 1963 he formed Voyage Theatre as a vehicle for performing Shakespeare's plays overseas. Amer's many roles included those of Romeo, Laertes (three times), Hamlet, Ferdinand (three times), Andrew Aguecheek, Donalbain and, as he got older, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Macduff. In the 1980s he toured the US playing King Duncan in an Old Vic production of Macbeth. His London stage appearances included A Man for All Seasons with Charlton Heston, Captain Brassbound's Conversion with Penelope Keith and The Wolf with Judi Dench and Leo McKern. Amer's first film part was as a 'pot boy' in The Mudlark (1950) with Alec Guinness and Irene Dunne. Other film appearances included Chapuys in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972), Al-risâlah (The Message) (1976) starring Anthony Quinn, Admiral Nelson in Nelson's Touch (1979), The Prince and the Pauper with Rex Harrison, Mallarmé in Gauguin the Savage (1980), Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) with Anthony Higgins and Janet Suzman, Chapuys again in A Man for All Seasons (1988), Ben Gunn in a re-make of Treasure Island (1990) with Charlton Heston, The Whipping Boy (1994), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) with Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, The Awakening (2011) with Rebecca Hall, a short, Heroes Return (2012) for Camelot, playing the World War II veteran Private Jack Jennings, filmed on location in the Burmese jungle on the border with Thailand, and his final film appearances playing Oggie in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) and as Mr Abney in the film (short) adaptation of Lost Hearts released in 2018. His many TV credits, starting in the early 1950s, included Hamlet (1961), The Avengers (1963), I, Claudius (1976), The Professionals (1979), If Tomorrow Comes (1986), Fortunes of War (1987), Jonathan Creek (1999), ChuckleVision (2004), Midsomer Murders (2005) and Borgia (2011). He also wrote numerous ballet and opera reviews for The Stage under his own name and under the pseudonym 'Kenneth Smart' and appeared in numerous TV commercials.
Montague Haltrecht died of cancer in March 2010, at home in Amer's arms.[200] Having suffered a fall at home in January 2017, Amer went to live at Denville Hall actors retirement home, where he spent the rest of his life, and died there peacefully in his sleep in November 2019 at the age of 96.[201]
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