Eric Richard Porter (8 April 1928 – 15 May 1995) was an English actor of stage, film and television.
Early life
Porter was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, to bus conductor Richard John Porter and Phoebe Elizabeth (née Spall). His parents hoped he would become an electrical engineer, so he was educated at the Technical College in Wimbledon, then worked for the Marconi Telegraph and Wireless company as a joint-solderer. He made his stage debut at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1945 at the age of 17.[1][2]
As quoted in the 2016 biography Peter O'Toole: The Definitive Biography by Robert Sellers, Susan Engel told the biographer that Eric Porter was gay: "His memorable BAFTA Best Actor Award-winning performance as Soames in the BBC's 1967 television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga should have led to greater things, but it didn't. 'He couldn't cope with his own sexuality,' says Susan. 'It was so awful for gay men in those days. I don't know how some of them managed to survive; and many didn't. You went to prison if you were caught. I think he suffered terribly. He was tortured.'"[16]
In The Telegraph, Ben Lawrence, in an article on The Forsyte Saga, observed that "the series made a star of Porter who, according to some sources, was secretly gay and deeply uncomfortable about the attention which The Forsyte Saga foisted on him."[17] In 1956 and All that: The Making of Modern British Drama (1999), the dramatist and academic Dan Rebellato includes Porter in a list of "gay men... powerful in the British theatre of the forties and fifties".[18]
The 2017 biography Eric Porter: The Life of an Acting Giant, by Porter's "friend and chosen biographer" Helen Monk, however, indicates that he was "previously understood... to be secretly gay", and details his relationships with "a string of female lovers", including "the foremost woman in his life for 40 years until his death... glamorous Dutch widow, Therese Megaw", Australian artist Alexandra Alderson, and his live-in secretary, Kay, a "Judi Dench-lookalike", with Monk concluding Porter "probably was bisexual".[19][20]