Australia's premiere Shakespearian actor John Bell is about to take his final bow from the company he founded.

The production of The Tempest which opens Friday night at the Sydney Opera House will end his 25-year career with the Bell Shakespeare company.

"I've done three Prosperos, three Macbeths, three King Lears, I can't complain I have had a very good run ... and now I think it is time to give somebody else a go," he said.

He said it was poignant that his last production (as director) was The Tempest.

"I didn't set out to do The Tempest because it was Shakespeare's last play ... and it was his signing off, his retirement piece," Bell said.

"It was only after we selected the play that I thought that is a coincidence. It's about a guy who is giving up his island and going into retirement."

Since playing Hamlet in 1973, John Bell has stamped himself as Australia's premiere Shakespearean actor. ( Supplied: Pierre Toussaint )

At the age of 75 John Bell is not exiting stage left entirely.

He has a "full dance card" of acting and directing appearances after he leaves Bell Shakespeare - but said he would not be hanging around "like a ghost".

Since playing Hamlet in 1973, John Bell has stamped himself as Australia's premiere Shakespearean actor.

"Funnily enough, my passion for Shakespeare has only grown over the years ... the more you do the more you want to do ... and keep exploring."

He believes in staging contemporary adaptations of the works with simple sets as was the case in Shakespeare's day.

"In the most part it was in broad daylight, on an empty stage and it was saying to the audience, use your imagination."

Speaking at a rehearsal today, he reflected on the growth of the company.

"We have established a national touring company; play 30 venues all over the country; we send three plays out on the road; we have an education program that plays to over 70,000 school children; we work in juvenile detention centres and Indigenous communities," Bell said.

"These places use Shakespeare to find self expression through performance."

John Bell with Anna Volska in a Bell Shakespeare production of Macbeth in 1994. ( Supplied )

Bell was approached in 1990 by his old friend Tony Gilbert, urging him to start a theatre company.

With his background in being trained at the Royal Shakespeare Company and having learnt the hard lessons in running a theatre company that went broke (The Nimrod), he was the ideal candidate.

Writing in his biography The Time Of My Life, Bell noted that:

"The thing I was most keen to pursue was the setting up of an acting ensemble of young performers of various ethnic backgrounds who would bring a fresh energy to performing Shakespeare, as well as a frame of reference that was not merely Anglo-Celtic."

He particularly wanted to reach out to students from non-English speaking background to make them feel it was theirs too.

"The charter I wrote myself in setting up the Bell Shakespeare Company - a national touring company of mainly young actors with open minds and unlimited energy, specialising in performing Shakespeare in productions that seek to relate the plays as closely as possible to the life experiences of audiences young and old."

John Bell as Richard III in a 2002 Bell Shakespeare production. ( Supplied )

Bell also wrote that he always found Shakespeare most exciting when performed in 'rough' conditions.

And rough it was when the company started in a circus tent with 800 blue plastic chairs. For the first season he directed Hamlet and played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

In Sydney, audiences drooped from the heat, in Canberra they shivered under blankets, whilst in Melbourne the press confidently predicted that the Bell Shakespeare Company was finished.

"Little by little we squeezed money out of the Australia Council for special projects," he said.

"We were to spend many dreary hours over the next seven years trudging the corridors of power and cajoling arts ministers, both state and federal to keep the company alive."

Bell Shakespeare has played to nearly 2.5 million Australians. Its education program is seen by 80,000 students a year.