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Hugh Percival Cruttwell (31 October 1918 – 24 August 2002) was a British drama teacher and consultant. He was Principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London, England for 18 years, from 1966 to 1984. After declaring himself to be a conscientious objector and consequently serving as an agricultural labourer during World War II, he began his professional life as a teacher in private schools but in 1947 moved into theatrical production, spending several years as a stage and production manager at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, Berkshire, England before becoming a freelance drama director. He combined his academic and theatrical experience when he joined the teaching staff at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) in 1959. After seven years there he was appointed Principal of RADA where he presided over one of its most illustrious periods, training many leading actors. He was regarded as having restored the academy's position as Britain's premier drama school. In retirement he served for ten years as artistic and production consultant to the actor and director Sir Kenneth Branagh. Early life Hugh Cruttwell was born in Singapore on 31 October 1918, the son of Clement Chadwick Cruttwell, a British insurance officer who spent much of his working life abroad, and Grace Fanny Cruttwell née Robin. He spent his early childhood in Shanghai, China but at the age of 10 his mother took him with his younger sister, Marjorie, to live in Britain. Cruttwell attended King's School, Bruton, a public school in Somerset, England as a boarder where he developed a love of the theatre and film and became adept at "sneaking out to watch the latest release at the local cinema". In the school holidays he went to his grandfather's vicarage in the village of Woodchurch, Birkenhead, England, where his mother had settled. In 1937 Cruttwell went up to Hertford College, Oxford (where an uncle, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, was Principal) to read modern history, graduating in the summer of 1940 in the first year of World War 2. As a conscientious objector to armed service, Cruttwell worked as an agricultural labourer for the duration of the war and then taught at a number of private preparatory schools before teaching history at Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire, England. While teaching he was “nursing an interest in theatre," Cruttwell told the New York Times in 1982, "but never doing anything about it in any capacity." Not enjoying teaching history, in 1947 he decided on a change of direction and sought work in the theatre. Stage manager and theatre director At the age of 28 Cruttwell found work as an assistant stage manager at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, Berkshire, England which then ran its own repertory company. In time he progressed to stage manager and then production manager. He "worked [his] way up" to an associate directorship at the Theatre Royal and directed plays at Windsor and other theatres in and around London, including the West End, for the next ten years, though as he later confessed to the New York Times, he had "a not very distinguished career as a director of several West End productions, all doomed to failure." Drama teacher Cruttwell found his métier, combining his love of theatre and his experiences of teaching and directing, when in 1959 he took up a directing and tutoring post at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) where among the students during his time there were Brian Cox, Stacy Keach, Martin Shaw and Janet Suzman. He remained at LAMDA for six years, until the end of 1965. Principal of RADA In October 1965, at the age of 46, Cruttwell was appointed principal of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London. In a change from the responsibilities of previous holders of the post, Cruttwell was to be in charge only of teaching and productions, the control of administration and finance being newly devolved to separate management. Cruttwell's popular predecessor, John Fernald, had had a widely publicised disagreement with the RADA Council over matters of spending priorities and executive responsibilities. The students backed him with strikes and sit-ins but, under pressure, his resignation in May 1965 was inevitable. As a result Cruttwell inherited control of an institution whose senior management was in some disarray and whose student body harboured deep unhappiness and some resentment about Fernald's departure. Starting work at the academy in January 1966, Cruttwell declared that "there have been so many strictures and so much bad blood, and this is the point in RADA's history when it must stop". Cruttwell decided his first tasks, as well as soothing the academy's unsettled atmosphere, were to establish his own teaching and production proposals, and to widen the scope of student admission. Well over a thousand aspiring young actors applied for the two-year RADA acting course every year during the 1960s, every one of whom was auditioned at least once. Of that huge number of hopefuls RADA had the capacity for an intake of at most only 20 or so every other term, resulting in 80 students under instruction at any one time and only 35 to 40 students completing their training each year. As the number of applicants was whittled down during the auditioning process Cruttwell would start to identify those to whom he would like to offer places. On how he made his choices, Cruttwell told The New York Times in 1982 that he was "not interested in competence": "I want a blank sheet on which they can write something. I can't be more precise than to say I'm looking for a capacity to transfix an audience ... If an applicant makes me sit up and take notice, that's what I want." In choosing students for the academy, Cruttwell "believed in taking risks, admired eccentricity ... and had an eye for performers as well as actors," said his obituarist in The Times. "He had an ability to discern promise in untutored aspirants whom conventional teachers might have regarded as clumsily crude." And as he had had experience in different fields before coming into theatre he was eager to encourage those who, like himself, had trained in other (sometimes wildly different) disciplines before taking up acting, resulting in a socially heterogeneous student intake with a wide age range. Despite his academic background he also maintained a disregard for the academic qualifications (or lack of them) of aspiring students. As a result, in the 1960s the RADA student body came to differ considerably from the perception in earlier years that it was a middle class finishing school. In a change to the views of his predecessors, Cruttwell held to the belief that the only way to learn to act was to act. His approach was radical: he dispensed with all the existing classes except the technical ones such as voice, movement, dance, singing, improvisation, stage fighting, make-up, stage technique and so on, and the rest of the time students would rehearse and perfo.... Discover the Michael Simkins popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Michael Simkins books.