Obituaries

The science fiction legend who took us on ‘a space odyssey’

Arthur C. Clarke

1917–2008

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Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, who has died at 90, was widely regarded as one of the “Big Three” of modern science fiction writers. The author of some 100 books and more than 1,000 short stories and essays, he had an uncanny knack for envisioning technologically plausible futures. Long before most people could even imagine such wonders, for instance, Clarke foresaw the advent of space stations and mobile phones. “When a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible,” he once said, “he is almost certainly right.”

Indeed, it was with science fact, not fiction, that the British-born Clarke first made his mark, said the London Daily Telegraph. A radar technician during World War II, he published a seminal 1945 paper that postulated communications satellites. Though Clarke called it “the most important thing I ever wrote,” a lawyer told him his ideas were too far-out to be patented; he thus forfeited billions when telecommunications emerged in the 1960s. Before long, Clarke was publishing fiction that, though “stilted in style,” combined hard science with prophetic themes. His novel Childhood’s End (1953) concerns the Overlords, “who lead humanity benevolently to transcend their ancestors and take their place with the cosmos’ motive spirit.” The City and the Stars (1956) also deals with “a journey toward an almost mystical understanding of the world and the cosmos which contains it.”

But for sheer cultural influence, said the Los Angeles Times, Clarke’s most important work clearly was 2001: A Space Odyssey. Published in 1968, 2001 was also a classic movie co-written by Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick. “The film concerns the ‘Dawn of Man,’ a mysterious black monolith, and a mission to Jupiter with a deadly, onboard talking computer named HAL. In the end, the sole surviving astronaut is reborn as a glowing embryo with large, haunting eyes, orbiting Earth in a translucent placenta.” Its mind-bending themes of man’s origins and alien encounters, combined with outstanding special effects, “minimal dialogue, and lack of plot and character development” made it one of the most discussed films ever. During one visit to the U.S., Clarke was told by an immigration official, “I won’t let you in until you explain the ending of 2001.”

Clarke was “a beaming and highly articulate shambles of a chap,” said the London Guardian. “His amazing career was possible largely because he was never, in any ordinary sense, quite a part of the world.” He lived for decades in Sri Lanka, not only because he loved its underwater diving—the closest thing, he said, to being weightless in space—but “because it helped him neutralize the influence of Western culture.” Though he rejected religion, Clarke embraced a universal spiritualism in both his life and his work. Simultaneously wry and optimistic, he once said he hoped to observe the meeting of alien and human intelligence, qualifying his remarks by “adding with his usual smile—‘if there is intelligence on Earth.’”

Married and divorced once, Clarke was crippled by post-polio syndrome and spent his last years confined to a wheelchair. In the late 1990s, he donated some of his hair to be launched into space aboard a private space probe, hoping that an alien race might one day clone him. “Re-creating its biological contents,” he said, “might be an amusing exercise for their equivalent of an infants’ class.”

The consummate actor who dominated the British stage

Paul Scofield

1922–2008

Paul Scofield decided on his career the moment he donned a girl’s blond wig for a school production of Romeo and Juliet. “Thenceforward there was nothing else I wanted to do,” he recalled. Over more than 60 years, Scofield’s rich voice and noble bearing made him one of England’s premier stage actors, culminating in his triumphant performance in A Man for All Seasons.

A schoolmaster’s son, Scofield joined the Birmingham Repertory Company in 1944, said The New York Times. He soon emerged as a “brilliant” Shakespearean performer, winning raves in Birmingham, Stratford, and, ultimately, London; in 1948, legendary theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of him, “This is the best Hamlet I have seen.” By the early 1950s, Scofield was touted as “the natural successor to the ruling triumvirate” of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud. He was helped by his 6-foot-2 frame, his craggily handsome face, and his voice, which director Fred Zinnemann likened to “a Rolls-Royce being started.” But his real gift was his mutability. As the “whiskey priest” in The Power and the Glory, he seemed to literally shrink; as King Lear, he was “choleric, willfully arrogant, and dangerously mercurial.” As Scofield himself put it, “I enjoy the loss of myself, of discovering a writer’s human creation.”

It was in 1960, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, that he found his signature stage role, said the London Times. As Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, he played a man torn between his duty to his king and to his God. “Disavowing any scruple of plaster-saint sentimentality, his dilemma gripped and held throughout.” Time magazine hailed his “weary magnificence” and his depiction of “the inner mind of a man destined for sainthood.” Scofield re-created the role in New York in 1962—his only appearance on Broadway—as well as in the 1966 film version. He won the Tony and the Oscar, one of only eight actors to receive both awards for the same part.

Scofield continued to work steadily after that defining moment, said Playbill, perhaps most notably as Antonio Salieri in the original, 1980 London production of Amadeus. He made a handful of films, among them Quiz Show (1994) and The Crucible (1996). But he avoided the Hollywood celebrity scene, preferring evenings at his English country home with Joy, his wife of 65 years. Intensely private, he gave few interviews. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag,” he explained. Scofield didn’t show up at the Academy Awards to pick up his own Oscar; asked how he would celebrate, he replied, “Oh, I suppose my wife and I will open a bottle of Champagne.” And though he received numerous honors and awards, he repeatedly refused a knighthood. “If you want a title,” he famously asked, “what’s wrong with Mister?”