Terry Hands

Terence David Hands (9 January 1941 – 4 February 2020) was a multi-award English theatre director. He founded the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for thirteen years during one of the company's most successful periods; he spent 25 years in all with the RSC. He also saved Clwyd Theatr Cymru from closure and turned it into the most successful theatre in Wales in his seventeen years as Artistic Director. He received several Olivier, Tony and Molière awards and nominations for directing and lighting. Early years Hands was born at Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He studied at Woking Grammar School, University of Birmingham before attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art leaving with the gold medal for acting in 1964. He then established the Liverpool Everyman where he directed numerous productions, including a prominent production of T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral". Career Hands was recruited by Peter Hall to the Royal Shakespeare Company two years later in 1966 to run the company's touring group, Theatregoround. He became an associate director there in 1967, directing his first production for them, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in 1968 at the age of 27. He became joint Artistic Director with Trevor Nunn in 1978, and in 1986 sole chief executive. As Director Emeritus and Artistic Director he directed more productions during his 25 years there than any other director in the company’s history. These included the entire History Cycle with Alan Howard, Much Ado About Nothing and Edmund Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac with Derek Jacobi and Sinéad Cusack (both productions transferred to Broadway), Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine with Sir Antony Sher, Loves Labours Lost with Ralph Fiennes, Anton Chekov's The Seagull with Sir Simon Russell Beale, A Winter’s Tale with Jeremy Irons, Othello with Sir Ben Kingsley and David Suchet and the award-winning musical Poppy. He was the first foreign director invited to direct at the Comédie-Française, made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and was appointed as a consultant director.