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Paddy Crean

STRATFORD, Ont. (CP) - Patrick (Paddy) Crean, a longtime fight director at the Stratford Festival who set international standards on staging combat in theatre, died Monday [12/22/2003] after an illness. He was 93.

Crean, who was a competitive fencer, began choreographing fights in 1932 when he was working in his native England as an actor in The Legends of Don Juan. From then on he was frequently hired to stage fight scenes in theatre and movies such as The Master of Ballantree and The Sword of Sherwood Forest.

He worked with actors including Paul Scofield, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Alec Guinness, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Errol Flynn, often acting as Flynn's stunt double in movies.

Crean first came to the Stratford Festival in 1962 to be fight arranger for Macbeth, directed by Peter Coe. After his second season in 1963, he decided to make Stratford his home and worked as the festival's fight director until 1983.

Among festival productions for which he arranged the swordplay, The Three Musketeers, directed by John Hirsch in 1968, received great acclaim for its stage action.

Crean returned from retirement in 1988 to assist fight director Jean- Pierre Fournier for The Three Musketeers directed by Richard Ouzounian.

"Paddy changed the way fights were done in the theatre," said John Brogan, a fight director who worked extensively with Crean in his later career. "Paddy's rule was that the fight action had to come from the context of the play, and he also personalized it to suit the actor: he had a very safe approach, and his guidelines on how to handle swords ended up being adopted as the guidelines used around the world."

Those guidelines were codified through the Society of British Fight Directors, for which Crean was a fight master. He was also fight master with Fight Directors Canada as well as an honorary member of the Society of American Fight Directors.

Crean continued to work as an actor, sometimes taking small roles in shows for which he had done fight arranging and also performing his one-man show about Rudyard Kipling, The Sun Never Sets, at Stratford's Avon Theatre in 1970.

An early marriage ended in divorce and there were no children. A funeral will be held Saturday in Stratford.