Scofield was one of only nine actors to win a Tony and an Oscar for the same part, and it was a great one: Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. (He also won an Emmy, for 1969's MALE OF THE SPECIES.) He never acted onstage again in the US (I would have liked to have seen him in AMADEUS in London) but turned up intermittently in films: superb as Burt Lancaster's Nazi opponent in THE TRAIN, with Lancaster again in SCORPIO, opposite Katharine Hepburn in A DELICATE BALANCE and Daniel Day-Lewis in THE CRUCIBLE, and an Oscar nominee once more for 1994's QUIZ SHOW. His voice does most of the work in Peter Brook's flash-frozen film of KING LEAR (1971), in austere black-and-white. And I really enjoyed him in 1994's Masterpiece Theater presentation of Dickens' MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. Terrific.

By all accounts, a simply darling man devoted to his craft and his family in equal proportions. He turned down a knighthood!

The Scofield film I'm eager to see is CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE (1958), the story of British spy Violetta Szabo starring Virginia McKenna with Scofield, Maurice Ronet and Billie Whitelaw in supporting roles. I think it's out as a British DVD.

. . . CARVE HER NAME WITH PRIDE will be out on May 13th in R1 from MGM . . .

CARVE is a fine film, one that TCM has started airing. (If TCM schedules a Scofield retrospective in the coming days, it may turn up.) Scofield, who seemed his SEASONS age the rest of his career, looks so young in it, too. (He was 36.)