Playing Sloane in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Kings Head Theatre preceded tours with the London Shakespeare Group's Macbeth of Iraq, Bangladesh, South Korea, Japan and Africa, where they played to Maasai warriors in the foothills of Mt Kilimanjaro. He played Macduff at Frank Dunlop's Young Vic Theatre, where a long association over the years developed. This production was toured around Mexico, finishing at the Guanahato Festival. Other plays at the Young Vic included King Lear, The Real Inspector Hound, A Man for all Seasons, Richard II, Gloo Joo and Caesar in Anthony and Cleopatra.
At the Bristol Old Vic he played Leonidik in Arbuzov's The Promise, and another production of Macbeth, this time playing Banquo, directed by Richard Cottrell. A film of Chekov's Zinotchka. An Australian film They Ran Before the Wind, filmed in the South Seas, in which Anthony played Fletcher Christian in a story of what happened after the mutiny on the Bounty.
He then played Bobby in American Buffalo at the National Theatre, directed by Bill Bryden, and starred in an American drama documentary about Jack the Ripper. Anthony was also in the Jack the Ripper film Murder by Decree (1979) with James Mason and Christopher Plummer.
He played Hamlet at the Northcott Theatre. Other roles there included Captain Plume in The Recruiting Officer and Sir Thomas Overbury in a new play Favours. Anthony also worked with Mike Hodges on the Tom Stoppard written film Squaring the Circle in 1984.
There have been many TV appearances, including Z-Cars, Casualty, Juliet Bravo, Dickens of London, The Bill, London's Burning, Anna Lee, The Paradise Club, El Cid, Bulman, Between the Lines, Softly, Softly, Rockliffe's Babies, Minder, All Quiet on the Preston Front, Chandler and Co, Boon, Coronation Street, The Dream Team, The Hutton Enquiry, The Ice House and Messiah, working with directors Adrian Shergold, Anthony Minghella, Martin Campbell, Stephen Poliakoff and Tim Fywell. Other stage plays include Richard II, Gloo Joo, Withdrawal Symptoms, A Chorus of Disapproval, Marino Faliero, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Launderette, A Last Belch for the Great Auk and The Nuns, which he also directed at the Roundhouse.[1]
A sought-after voice artist, May produced and appeared in one-off poetry and music events. In 2013, under the name Traceless, May and musician Ceri Evans released two spoken-word albums—Rumi in Love[2] and Divani Nurbakhsh[3]—featuring the poetry of 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi.
Personal life and death
May married actress Vanessa Pett in 1992 and they had two children together, Harry and Lily. He also had two other children, Jack and Jessica, from a previous marriage to Charlotte Panton. He died on 24 December 2021, at the age of 75.[4]
