Eric Richard Porter (April 8, 1928 - May 15, 1995) was a distinguished English actor who appeared on stage as well as in cinema and television.
Porter was born in Shepherds Bush, London to Richard John Porter and his wife Phoebe Elizabeth née Spall and educated at Wimbledon Technical College before making his stage debut in Cambridge at the age of seventeen.
In 1955, he played the title role in Ben Jonson's Volpone at the Bristol Old Vic. In 1960 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company; that year, he played Ferdinand in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In 1962, his performance as Iachimo in Cymbeline was widely praised.
Porter's greatest success was as the tortured solicitor Soames Forsyte in the BBC dramatization of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga (1967). For this role he won a BAFTA Best Actor award.
Eric Porter was a leading member of Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during the 1960's, where his roles included Ulysses, Macbeth, Leontes, Malvolio, Shylock, King Lear, and Henry IV, as well as Marlowe's Jew of Malta (Barabas) with Tony Church, Donald Burton, Bruce Condell and Timothy West.
He was a versatile actor who played memorable roles in television dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown; he was also seen as Fagin in the 1985 BBC version of Oliver Twist and as Professor Moriarty opposite Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes in Granada Television's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stories The Red-Headed League and The Final Problem (both 1985). He also played Polonius in a 1980 television production of Hamlet, made as part of the BBC Shakespeare series, and starring Derek Jacobi in the title role.
Porter continued to act on stage, winning the London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor in 1988 for his role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Porter died of colon cancer in London in 1995. On January 17, 2007, Peter O'Toole was interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show and was asked by Rose which actor had influenced him the most, and O'Toole replied, "Eric Porter."
