All good actors have stories to tell, but few related better or more affectionate tales than did Keith Baxter, who has died aged 90. An intimate colleague and friend of Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Taylor, Noël Coward, Maggie Smith and Joan Collins, he was laden with perceptive comments about all of them.
His pivotal professional experience was playing Prince Hal to Welles’s Falstaff in the latter’s celebrated conflation of both parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight, first on the stage in Belfast and Dublin in 1960, then in the movie of the same name in 1965, one of the best Shakespeare films of the last century.
