John Hannah (actor)
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John Hannah (born April 23, 1962) is a Scottish actor from East Kilbride. Hannah is the youngest of three children-he has two older sisters. He attended Claremont High School in East Kilbride and went on to an apprenticeship as an electrician. In East Kilbride, he participated in the East Kilbride Rep Theatre Club.
At the suggestion of a co-worker, he completed his apprenticeship and then attended the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. After graduation, he had parts in theatre productions, films, and television, including leading roles, then broke into the "big-time" with his appearance as Matthew in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).
Since his breakthrough role in Four Weddings..., he has played a wide range of psychopathic killers alongside Helen Baxendale (Truth or Dare) and a mystery-solving pathologist McCallum. He played a karaoke-mad dead-beat dad (The James Gang), drunken, thieving comic relief (The Mummy, 1999) and a Monty Python-quoting romantic comedy love interest (Sliding Doors, 1998). He also starred in the axed U.S. series MDs (2002), as well as guest appearances in Alias (2001), Frasier (2002) and Carnivale (2002). In 2006 he starred in the drama series New Street Law.
Hannah was married on 20 January 1996 to actress Joanna Roth. The pair met several years before during a stage production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. In many of his interviews, he mentions stories from their relationship, such as the visit to London's Sri Siam restaurant where he proposed to her in writing on the tablecloth. They had twins, a boy named Gabriel and a girl named Astrid on 11 February 2004.
For years, Hannah has made an effort to use his status as a celebrity to support charitable causes. Soon after his role as the epileptic police officer Franky Drinkall in Out Of The Blue, he showed his support for the Epilepsy Association of Scotland. He was, for a long time, a spokesman for Oxfam's Cut Conflict Campaign.
On December 24, 1997, John Hannah and Scottish Films producer Murray Ferguson established a production company called Clerkenwell Films. Clerkenwell's first big production was the Rebus series, including Black And Blue and The Hanging Garden. However, Rebus was later taken in-house by SMG Productions, and Hannah was replaced in the leading role in the series by Ken Stott.
