Veteran actor Edward Fox performs at York’s Bar Convent (From York Press)

Veteran actor Edward Fox performs at York’s Bar Convent

10:07am Wednesday 23rd November 2011 in News By Mike Laycock, Chief reporter

FILM and TV star Edward Fox visited York’s Bar Convent to recite “the greatest poem of the 20th century” to a sell-out audience.

The actor, best known for his roles in blockbuster movies such as The Day of the Jackal, A Bridge Too Far and Gandhi, performed TS Eliot’s lengthy The Four Quartets by memory last night.

The Evening With Edward Fox, staged in the ornate Bar Convent Chapel in Blossom Street, raised funds towards a revamp of the convent’s museum, said Sister Agatha, of the convent.

She said she had been friends with Edward Fox and his wife Joanna, who accompanied him yesterday, for a number of years, but this was their first visit to the convent.

She had met the couple when they had sat next to each other at a memorial service in Westminster for the billionaire philanthropist John Paul Getty, who had earlier saved the convent from financial ruin with a major donation.

Sister Agatha said someone had asked her recently if Edward was coming to York because he was on tour. “I said: ‘No, he isn’t. He is coming up specially!’ She spoke of her admiration for The Four Quartets, which was written during the bleak times of the Second World War but still included the lines: “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

The actor, who said he had performed many years ago at York Theatre Royal, said he had recited the Four Quartets on dozens of occasions since learning it by heart in the 1970s.

“It really is the greatest poem of the 20th century – bar none,” he said, recalling how he had once performed it in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle, and asked a woman afterwards if she had enjoyed it. She said: “It were exactly what I were thinking myself.”

The actors’ wife, actress Joanna David, revealed how Sister Agatha had given her tips when she had been asked to perform as the Prioress of Midsomer Priory in an episode of the ITV drama Midsummer Murders, broadcast recently.