Actors - Roy Marsden

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Roy Marsden

	Actors - Roy Marsden

Roy Marsden (born on June 25 1941 in Stepney, London) is a British actor.

Education

Marsden attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and spent four terms there. However, he attempted to unionize the students and was thwarted. After one argument he poured a bottle of ink down the front of the director's suit.

Marsden recalled, "Two weeks later, he phoned me up and asked if I'd got a job or an agent. I said no, so he arranged for me to start work at a theatre in Nottingham, and who should be the student assistant manager there but Anthony Hopkins. I persuaded him to go to RADA."

Stage

In the early 1960s, Marsden worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company then began to accumulate an extensive list of theatrical credits that includes everything from Sternheim, Chekhov and Ibsen to contemporary Soviet playwright Alexander Vampilov.

He preferred the alternative experimental theaters of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Birmingham over London's commercial theatre.

Appearances include Crispen in "The Friends", 1970; Casca and Lucilius in "Julius Caesar", 1972; Paul Schippel in "Schippel", 1974; Heinrich Krey in "The Plumber's Progress", 1975.

He played Long John Silver in "Treasure Island" at London's Mermaid Theatre around Christmas for two years and Henry Higgins in "Pygmalion".

Television

Marsden is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Adam Dalgliesh in the television dramatisations of P.D. James's detective novels. These included:

Death of an Expert Witness (1983);
Cover Her Face (1985);
The Black Tower (1985);
A Taste of Death (1989);
Devices and Desires (1991).

George Osborne in Masterpiece Theatre's Vanity Fair, 1972

Neil Burnside in Yorkshire Television's The Sandbaggers 1978, about an elite covert operations section of British Intelligence.

Arthur Chipping in Masterpiece Theatre's Goodbye Mr. Chips, 1987; John Bennet in ABC's Inside Story, 1988.

There was a guest appearance in The New Avengers (TV series); Space 1999; Tales of the Unexpected; and he played a sinister friar in "The Legend of Robin Hood."

Yorkshire Television cast him in Airline, a series in which he played Jack Ruskin, a scrappy World War II pilot trying to start his own post-war airline against establishment opposition. It also starred his wife, Polly Hemingway, who was pregnant with their first child during most of the filming.

In an interview Marsden said "It was one of the most enjoyable programmes I ever made. Learning to fly those old DC-3s was terrific. And I enjoyed playing Ruskin enormously because he had hope. Of course, he was a pain up the tushie most of the time, but then you'd see that youthful desire to actually get out and triumph against enormous odds. I identified with that character the most."

Film

He has appeared in: The Squeeze, Warner Brothers, 1976; a walk-on part with one line (as a Nazi officer) in the classic The Eagle Has Landed
; as Oberon in Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God; in Dangerous Lady 1995; A Higher Agency 2005.

Other Interests

Marsden is married to actress Polly Hemingway and has two sons, one named Joseph. In his spare time, Marsden windsurfs, sails, and restores a 78-year old fishing ketch. Much of his free time is spent with his children and their friends.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Roy Marsden ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Roy Marsden; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay