Peter O'Toole and JFK

This production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet, saw the deaths of a king, a prince... and a President of the United States.

Lynn Redgrave played a lady-in-waiting in a November 1963 production of Hamlet at London's National Theatre, directed by Lawrence Olivier. The only conspiracy the audience was thinking about was the one at the court of Elsinore, until events in another country intervened. She recounts:

While we were in the middle of a performance, JFK (John F. Kennedy) was assassinated, and those of us who were ladies-in-waiting and having long gaps in between when we weren’t on stage, learned about it first on the radio down in the canteen.

There was this horrifying feeling of coming back up onstage and knowing that not everybody knew. You knew this terrible news, there had been a couple of intermissions and certainly the audience all knew by then, as well.

My father [Michael Redgrave, playing Claudius] stepped forward at the end of the performance and asked for a two-minute silence. It was a most extraordinary experience to be onstage at the end of a great tragedy – everybody has just died you know – Hamlet has died, the Queen has died, and everybody is lying there dead – and then ( for my father) to stand up and then talk about this devastating assassination and then to ask for silence.

Everybody cried.

It was most extraordinary, and that of course was England. He wasn’t our president but it had that sort of effect.