Eric Portman who died at his home in (St Veep) Cornwall on December 7, 1969, at the age of 66, was an actor of strong individuality whose work ranged from Shakespeare and Shaw to modern plays as diverse as White Cargo, Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry and Eliot's The Elder Statesman. He was too, a very effective actor on both cinema and television screens.
Eric Portman was born in Yorkshire on July 13, 1903, and educated in Rishworth School. For a time he worked as a shop assistant in a store in Leeds and consoled his leisure with membership of the Halifax Opera Society, but in 1923 he joined Robert Courtneidge's Shakespeare Company while it was playing at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, played his first speaking part with the company at the Victoria Theatre Sunderland in 1924, and reached London as Antipholus of Syracuse, in The Comedy of Errors, in the same year.
In 1925, he moved from classical drama to win a great success as Worthing, in White Cargo, and exploited his new interest in modern plays until 1927, when he joined the Old Vic Company, for which his parts included Romeo, Charles Surface, Edmund in King Lear, Arcite in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Strength in Everyman.
Portman's success as Undershaft, in Shaw's Major Barbara, at the Wyndham's Theatre in 1929 first revealed his understanding of Shavian drama, which provided a splendid outlet for his gift of quiet, remorseless energy. Between then and the outbreak of war he played leading rôles in a remarkable number of plays, both new and classical, in England and New York. The unrelenting determination he could give to any rôle capable of accepting it was exploited in a number of wartime films – 49th Parallel, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, We Dive At Dawn and Millions Like Us.
Not all the many rôles he played in London and New York after the war until early 1968, when ill-health forced him to retire while playing in Galsworthy's Justice, were able to give him the stimulus his gifts needed. It will, however, not be easy to forget his playing of the crippled priest in Graham Greene's The Living Room, or Crocker-Harris, the disappointed schoolmaster of Rattigan's The Browning Version and Major Pollock in the same dramatist's Separate Tables. In the New York production of Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry, his playing of the pathetic, self-deluding Bob Cherry was, critics noted, as fine as any of his earlier work.
Portman brought to all his major rôles a quality of relentless, driving integrity. The U-Boat commander of 49th Parallel, making his way across Canada to the still-neutral United States, was typical of his power to raise the audiences admiration for courage and determination through a rôle that was never amiable.
He gave a moving performance as an aging criminal in Deadfall, his last film, which was shown in London in 1968.
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