Ciarán Hinds
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| Ciarán Hinds | |
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 Hinds in BBC/HBO TV Series Rome
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| Born | 9 February 1953 Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK |
Ciarán Hinds (born 9 February 1953) is a Belfast born film, television, stage, and radio actor.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Ciarán Hinds was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Raised a Roman Catholic in North Belfast, he was one of five children and the only son of his physician father and amateur actress mother. He was an Irish dancer in his youth and was educated at Holy Family Primary School and St. Malachy's College. After leaving St. Malachy's, he enrolled as a law student at Queen's University, but was soon persuaded to pursue acting and abandoned his studies at Queen's to enroll at the esteemed Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
[edit] Career
Hinds has been involved with many theatre productions as a member of the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His most notable RSC performance came in the title role of the 1993 production of Richard III directed by Sam Mendes; Mendes turned to Hinds as a last minute replacement for an injured Simon Russell Beale. In 1987, he was cast by Peter Brook in The Mahabarata, a six hour theatre piece that toured the world, as well as in its 1989 film version. In Ireland, he has performed with the Abbey Theatre, the Field Day Theatre Company, the Druid Theatre, the Lyric Players' Theatre and at the Project Arts Centre. He gained his most popular recognition as a stage actor for his performance as Larry in the London and Broadway productions of Patrick Marber's Tony Award-nominated play Closer. In 1999, Hinds was awarded both the Theatre World Award for Best Debut in NYC and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Special Achievement (Best Ensemble Cast Performance) for his work in Closer. His most recent stage appearance was in 2001 in The Yalta Game by Brian Friel at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
Hinds' portfolio of film portrayals includes Firmin in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, Jonathan Reiss in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, John Traynor in Veronica Guerin, and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Jane Austen's Persuasion. Other films include Mickybo and Me (2005), Calendar Girls (2003), The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Weight of Water (2000), Titanic Town (1998), Oscar and Lucinda (1997), December Bride (1990), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), and Excalibur (1981).
In 2006, Hinds portrayed Gaius Julius Caesar in the first season of BBC/HBO's series, Rome. In the film Amazing Grace (which premièred at the closing of the Toronto Film Festival in September, 2006, due for release in February, 2007), depicting the life and work of William Wilberforce and the fight for the abolition of the slave trade, Hinds portrays Sir Banastre Tarleton, one the chief opponents of abolition in parliament. The previous year, 2005, Hinds played Carl, a cover-up professional assisting a group of assassins, in Steven Spielberg's political thriller, Munich. He also appeared in Michael Mann's film adaptation of the 80's television show, Miami Vice, which was released in July 2006.
Hinds has also been featured in a number of made-for-television movies, more recently as French existentialist Albert Camus in Broken Morning (2003) and then in the role of Michael Henchard in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (2004), for which he received the Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series.
Additional notable performances include Hinds' portrayals of the Irish writer and former hostage Brian Keenan in HBO's television docudrama Hostages and several fictional characters including Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Edward Parker-Jones in the crime drama series Prime Suspect 3, Abel Mason in the late Dame Catherine Cookson's The Man Who Cried and Jim Browner in The Memories of Sherlock Holmes episode The Cardboard Box.
Hinds' dramatic abilities have been put to great use in audiobook and radio productions as well. He performed as Valmont in the BBC Radio production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Hinds also narrated the Penguin Audiobook Ivanhoe, and, in 2004, was given the Audie Award for "Best Audio Drama Performance", for his performance in the fully dramatized recordings of William Shakespeare's plays included in The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare.
