 A tall, sinewy, versatile actor whose piercing eye and incisive articulation are capable of either sinister or comic suggestion but which do not readily conduce to romantic leads. A former art student before training at RADA, he has had a distinguished stage career, playing in several musicals including My Fair Lady (2000), as Higgins, and his unconventional screen career gathered momentum when he played the ambitious media journalist in the state-of-the-nation piece, The Ploughman's Lunch (d. Richard Eyre, 1983). He is very droll as a hapless bureaucrat in Brazil (d. Terry Gilliam, 1985), the whiskery layabout Norman in The Rachel Papers (d. Damian Harris, 1989) and the epigrammatic Lytton Strachey in Carrington (UK/France, d. Christopher Hampton, 1994); is an aptly enigmatic figure as Rivière in The Age of Innocence (US, d. Martin Scorsese, 1993), a charismatic Juan Perón in Evita (UK/US, d. Alan Parker, 1996), and a saturnine media mogul bent on world domination (of course) in the Bond caper, Tomorrow Never Dies (UK/US, d. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997). Into the new century, an established character star of the first magnitude, he was busier than ever, on TV as well as film and theatre. Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Film
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FILM & TV CREDITS
