British Actors Archives - Page 41 of 131

Michael Feast

Michael Feast was born in 1946 in Brighton. He made his debit in the British TV series “This Golden Age” in 1967. His movies include “I Start Counting” in 1969, “McVicker” and “Velvet Goldmine”.

Interview with “What’s on Stage”:

By Editorial Staff • 12 Mar 2001 • West End

Michael Feast‘s long and distinguished stage career includes roles in The Tempest (with Sir John Gielgud as Prospero), No Man’s Land, American Buffalo, Murder in the Cathedral, The Possessed,Carousel and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Most recently, he’s been seen in London in Jeffrey Archer‘s The Accused at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, The Forest, opposite the late Michael Williams at the National and Timberlake Wertenbaker‘s After Darwin at the Hampstead Theatre.

His other credits include, on television, Touching Evil, Kavanagh QC, A Touch of Frost andMidsomer Murders; and on film, Sleepy Hollow, Velvet Goldmine and Long Time Dead.

Date & place of birth
Born 25 November 1946 in Brighton, East Sussex, EnglandTrained at
Central School of Speech & Drama

First big break
Playing a lead part (Woof) and singing a song called “Sodomy” in the original 1968 London production of Hair.

Career highlight
Playing a black fender stratocaster (a type of electric guitar) and singing “The Seventh Sun” with Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band.

Favourite production that you’ve worked on
No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter at the National and in the West End. Why? Because you don’t get to work with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson every week.

Favourite co-star
Michael Williams in The Forest at the National Theatre. He always passed the ball, and he gave me the opportunity to be a comedian.

Favourite director
Neil Bartlett. You’d have to work with him to find out why.

Favourite playwright
Shakespeare. Who else?

What roles would you most like to play still?
Prospero, King Lear, a bad man in a grey hat in a Western directed by Clint Eastwood.

What’s the best thing currently on stage?
I haven’t seen much recently, but Mose Allison (jazz musician) is always worth catching when he’s in town.

What advice would you give to government to secure the future of British theatre?
Pass draconian laws that prohibit the making and broadcasting of idiot dramas on the telly – copy shows, medical shows, ropey adaptations of novels, etc. Then the idiot producers would go out of business and we could all start again in the theatre. And an extra bit of advice to government – reinstate Equity’s closed shop status.

If you could swap places with one person, living or dead, who would it be?
Elvis Presley for just the period of about a year in the mid-1950s when he was recording at Sun Studios in Memphis with Sam Phillips and the Hillbilly Cats. Why? “Just because…” as the King said.

Favourite book
Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

Favourite after-show haunt
In my house with my wife

Favourite holiday destination
Barbados

Why did you want to do The Servant?
Wonderful part, wonderful play, wonderful director, wonderful theatre.

What’s your favourite line from The Servant?
“Hasn’t he got a lot of ties?”

What was the funniest moment during rehearsals for The Servant?
When the fantastically shaped loo was found to be crawling with lice underneath and every giggle ended in a shudder.

The Servant, about a spoiled young aristocrat and his wily servant, runs at the Lyric Hammersmith from 13 March to 21 April 2001 (previews from 8 March).

Paul Copley was born in 1944 in West Yorkshire. He seems to specialise in North Country types. Most recent appearance was in “Downton Abbey”. Films include “A Bridge Too Far” in 1977, “Zulu Dawn” and “The Remains of the Day”. He has an extensive CV including television and the stage. He is married to actress Natasha Pyne.

IMDB entry:

Paul Copley was born on November 25, 1944 in Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, England. He is an actor, known for The Remains of the Day (1993), A Bridge Too Far (1977) andHoratio Hornblower: The Duel (1998).

per wikipedia:

As an actor, Khan-Din participated in some 20 British films and TV series in the late 1980s and the 1990s. He made his film debut in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), but is perhaps best known for the role of Sammy in Hanif Kureishi‘s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) and as one of the leading characters in the film Idiot from 1992.

In the late 1990s, Kahn-Din began writing plays, the first was East is East (1997) for the Royal Court Theatre, was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best New Comedy.^[1]The play draws very much from Kahn-Din’s own childhood in Salford, where he grew up in a large family with a British Pakistani father and a white British mother. In interviews, he has stated that the young boy Sajid Khan is a self-portrait, and that Sajid’s parents are very exact portraits of his own parents.^[2]^[3]

In 1999, the film version of East is East was released, starring Om Puri as the father and Linda Bassett as the mother. Khan-Din adapted his own play, and won both a British Independent Film Award and a London Critics’ Circle Film Award for his screenplay, as well as being nominated for two BAFTA Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer, and for a European Film Award for Best Screenwriter.^[4]

In 2007 Rafta, Rafta…, a play Kahn-Din wrote, opened at the Lyttelton stage of the Royal National Theatre in London. It is a comic adaptation of the 1963 Bill Naughton play, All in Good Time. The play is set in the working class English town of Bolton, and examines a story of marital difficulties within an immigrant Indian family. The play has since opened both in New York at the New Group in 2008, and at the HuM Theatre in Singapore in 2010. In 2012, a film adaption of Rafta, Rafta… was released under the title All in Good Time, it directed by Nigel Cole and with Reece Ritchie in the leading role.^[5]^[6]

In 2010, West is West, a sequel to East is East, premiered at film festivals in Toronto and London, with a wide UK release scheduled for February 2010.^[3] In this film, the story is set in 1975, four years after the story in ‘East is East. Father George Khan is worried that his youngest son, Sajid, now 15, is turning his back on his Pakistani heritage, so he decides to take him for a visit to Pakistan.^[7]

Dennis Lill was born in 1942 in Hamilton, New Zealand. Most of his career has been based in the U.K. He made his television debut in “Crossroads” in 1964. He had a major role in the mini-series “Fall of Eagles” in 1974. Other credits include series such as “The Regiment” and “Warship and movies such as “The Eagle Has Landed” in 1976.

Sean Arnold is best known for his role as ‘Crozier’ the Chief Inspector in “Bergerac” which ran from 1981 until 1990. He was bron in Gloucestershire in 1941. Other credits include “North Sea Hijack” in 1979, “Hunters of the Deep” and “Fuel”. Sean Arnold died in 2020 at the age of 79.

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Elizabeth Counsell was born in 1942 in Windsor. She is the daughter of actress Mary Kerridge. Among Ms Counsell’s credits are “The Mind Benders” in 1963, “From Russia With Love”, “The Intelligence Men”, “Claudia” and more recen tly “Song For Marion” with Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave.

Toby Stephens was born in 1969 in London. He is the son of actors Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith. He made his acting debut in 1992 in the miniseries “The Camomile Lawn”. He played the villian in the James Bond in “Die Another Day” in 2002. He also starred as ‘Rochester’ in “Jane Eyre” with Ruth Wilson.

TCM overview:

It was perhaps only natural that this second son of Sir Robert Stephens and Dame Maggie Smith should follow in his parents’ stead and pursue a career as an actor. Handsome, dark-haired Toby Stephens began to land key roles in stage and screen productions almost immediately after his 1991 graduation from LAMDA. He first made an impression with British TV audiences co-starring with Jennifer Ehle in “The Chamomile Lawn” in 1992, the same year he debuted on the big screen in “Orlando”.

Stephens went on to a distinguished stage career, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and becoming the youngest actor with the troupe to undertake the lead in the Bard’s “Coriolanus” (1994). Daring to step into the shadow of Marlon Brando, he tackled the role of Stanley Kowalski opposite Jessica Lange in the 1996 Peter Hall-staged London production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”. His rising status as a leading man was cemented with his turn as Orsino in “Twelfth Night” (1996), Trevor Nunn’s feature adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, and as Gilbert Markham, the Yorkshire farmer who falls for a married woman, in the small screen version of Anne Bronte’s novel “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” (also 1996). Although his next couple of films didn’t fare too well at the box office, Stephens earned mostly good notices for his work, whether playing an early 20th-century photographer in “Photographing Fairies” (1997) or 19th-century men in “Cousin Bette” (1998) or “Onegin” (1999). After making his Broadway debut playing twins in the farcical “Ring Around the Moon” in 1999, the actor was tapped to portray the young incarnation of director-star Clint Eastwood’s astronaut in “Space Cowboys” (2000). That same year, he tried to embody F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elusive titular character in the A&E version of “The Great Gatsby”, but while he cut the proper dashing figure, something was missing in his interpretation of the role. He fared better in his homeland playing a supporting role in the critically-acclaimed BBC2 presentation “Perfect Strangers” (2001) and a return to the stage alongside Dame Judi Dench in “The Royal Family”. Director Neil LaBute tapped Stephens to play a self-serving academic in “Possession” (2002) before the actor landed a part that reach his wide audience yet– the villainous Gustav Graves in “Die Another Day” (2002), the 20th James Bond film. Stephens held his own against Pierce Brosnan as 007, proving one of the more charismatic of the recent Bond bad guys and demonstrating a flair for physical combat in the action-packed fencing sequence with Brosnan.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.