The Theater: Dance of Words

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Wood never actually decided to become an actor and expose himself to such anguish. The son of a middle-class family from the Midlands, he studied law at Oxford before chucking it to try directing. He became an actor "to find out what they did." His first role in an undergraduate production was Richard HI; his acting was described by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times as "a frightening, powerful performance."

Cuckolded Dentist. Wood frightened his colleagues too. First the Old Vic, then the Royal Court wanted little part of him. He found them, in turn, unbearably clubby. He decided to go into television. "I played the classics," he says. "I thought it was the way to build a reputation, but the audience got tired of me." By 1967 Wood was tired too. "I thought I'd never find a playwright whose work I liked." Then he was sent Teeth, a television comedy by an unknown named Tom Stoppard. Wood played a cuckolded dentist who turned his rival's teeth green. Shortly afterward, Wood starred on Broadway in Stoppard's first stage hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Establishment again beckoned; the RSC had asked Wood four times before he agreed to join them. To his relief, "they accepted me completely." The RSC is now home. He can do what he wants: an iconoclastic Brutus in 1972, then the suave, icy Sherlock Holmes last year. The company even helped him buy a house. Now he has moved his wife Sylvia and their three children to the mellow-stoned Cotswolds town of Chipping Camden, where walking down the street is "like listening to Mozart—organic, inevitable but totally unexpected."

Wood is not relaxing, however. His life seems fragile. As a teenager, he spent 15 months in hospital after a car crash that left him with one leg shorter than the other; drafted into the army, he was accidentally shot in the back. In 1969 he had a major cancer operation. "I have apprehended death. It releases vitality." Now he is pacing himself like a champion aiming for a final thrust at supremacy. "I hate being called 'in fashion.' I've earned my success," he says. 'I've been 22 years in this business, 18 of them by the generosity of my bank manager, without whom I'd have been a bank manager."