and graduated with a degree in English, fine art, and mathematics. In addition to his acting roles at Edinburgh University, he also directed many plays there, and he designed costumes for several as well. From 1967 through 1973, Charleson also performed often at the Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, becoming a noted actor in those circles. Stage career LAMDA, Young Vic, and Cambridge Theatre Company After graduating in 1970 from the University of Edinburgh – where he played leads in numerous productions, including several Shakespeare plays – Charleson won a place in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), where he studied for two years. From LAMDA, Charleson was hired by Frank Dunlop's Young Vic Theatre Company. He made his professional stage debut in 1972 with the Young Vic, as one of the brothers in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1972), which was also televised in the UK that same year by Granada Television. In 1973, he starred as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and that year he was also Hamlet and later Guildenstern in the first revival of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Also as part of the Young Vic company, he was Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing in 1974. He traveled with the company to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York that same year, to appear as Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, Ottavio in Scapino, and Brian Curtis in French Without Tears. In late 1974, he played the title role in Hamlet with the Cambridge Theatre Company, where he had previously performed that year in The School for Scandal and Six Characters in Search of an Author, and the production went on tour into 1975. His performance of Hamlet garnered good reviews; nevertheless Charleson felt he had not done the notoriously difficult role complete justice. West End and National Theatre debuts, Royal Shakespeare Company Charleson made his West End debut in 1975, in a long-running production of Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged at the Queen's Theatre. In it he played Dave, a surly Scottish lodger, opposite Alan Bates. He next appeared at the National Theatre, where he performed Octavius in Julius Caesar in 1977. That year he also played Peregrine in the classic play Volpone, opposite John Gielgud, and Captain Phoebus in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Charleson then spent a year in Stratford-upon-Avon with the