Michael Croft; Founded Britain’s Youth Theater

Michael Croft, who founded the National Youth Theater and became a theatrical father figure to three decades of British actors--including Michael York, Derek Jacobi and Ben Kingsley--has died of a heart attack, hospital officials said. He was 64.

Croft, who died Sunday, was a schoolteacher when he founded the National Youth Theater in 1956. He said he did it because he needed “something (to do) in the holidays.”

Among the talent from the National Youth Theater were Kingsley, the Oscar-winning actor in “Gandhi”; Helen Mirren, star of the movies “Cal” and “White Nights,” and Jacobi, the 1985 Tony-winning actor for “Much Ado About Nothing” on Broadway.

Other well-known alumni are Ian McShane, Simon Ward and Sarah Douglas.

The theater marked its 30th anniversary this summer with an open-air production of the first play it ever performed, Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”

Croft attended Oxford University and was an English teacher at Alleyn’s School in southeast London where he directed productions of Shakespeare.

He founded the theater with a group from Alleyn’s School, and the organization represented Britain at theater festivals in Paris in 1960 and in West Berlin in 1961.