Douglas Hodge
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Douglas Hodge (born 1963 in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK) is a British actor and director. He trained for the stage at RADA. His partner is Tessa Peake-Jones, and they have two children.
He is a council member of the National Youth Theatre for whom, in 1989, he co-wrote Pacha Mama's Blessing and 'Forest People' for the B.B.C. about the Amazon rain forests. He is also an Associate Director of the Donmar Warehouse.
[edit] Career
Theatre
Hodge has achieved great success on stage as a performer in the work of playwright Harold Pinter, including No Man's Land (Comedy Theatre, February 1993); Moonlight (Almeida Theatre, September 1993); A Kind of Alaska, The Lover and The Collection in a Pinter season at the Donmar Warehouse, May 1998; Betrayal (National Lyttelton, November 1998); and The Caretaker (Comedy Theatre, November 2000, co-starring Michael Gambon and Rupert Graves, directed by Patrick Marber).
He speaks very highly of Pinter,[1] and chose a double bill of sketches by Pinter and The Dumb Waiter as his directorial debut at the Oxford Playhouse in 2004.
For the National Theatre in May 1994 he played the title role in Phyllida Law's Olivier Theatre staging of Shakespeare's Pericles; and 'Al' in Stephen Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun, directed by Ron Daniels at the Cottesloe Theatre in May 1997. gerry in betrayal and The doctor in a matter of life and death,
He played Leontes in an RSC revival of The Winter's Tale at the Round House in April 2002. Directed by Matthew Warchus, it was relocated in a world of 'film noir' and Country music, a version of the Shakespeare play originally planned for American production. "Shaven-headed Hodge, a tyrannical Leontes chopping up the verse into tiny spiteful pieces, is a dead-ringer for Orson Welles, bald and fuming in the penultimate reel of Citizen Kane — even when he comes on in flat cap and plus-fours as a Chicago heavy, dressed for a round of golf."[2].
In Michael Blakemore's revival of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Playhouse Theatre in April 2003 he played Andrei; and the following year at the Royal Court he portrayed Barry, a television comedian whose career is on the skids, in Joe Penhall's enthralling study of entrapment journalism Dumb Show, directed by Terry Johnson which opened in September 2004 to positive reviews, particularly for Hodge's performance [1].
Hodge appeared in the 2005 revival of Guys and Dolls at the Piccadilly Theatre playing Nathan Detroit opposite Ewan McGregor's Sky Masterson [2].
During the summer of 2006 he played the title role in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe in London [3]. Simultaneously he made his West End directorial debut with See How They Run, a 1940's wartime farce, preceded by a successful UK tour [4].
In May 2007 he played Frank, the neurosurgeon in A Matter of Life and Death with the Kneehigh company at the National Theatre [5]. Also in 2007, he guest starred in the Doctor Who audio dramas Urban Myths and Son of the Dragon.
From 9 January to 8 March 2008 he starred as Albin in the musical La Cage aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory [6].
Music
As Doug Hodge he recorded a debut music album Cowley Road Songs in 2006.
Television and film
Hodge won notice as Dr Tertius Lydgate in the BBC 1994 production of Middlemarch, directed by Anthony Page and adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by George Eliot.
His other TV appearances include leading roles in Behaving Badly (1989); Capital City (1989-1990); Bliss (1995); The Uninvited (1997); The Scold's Bridle (1998); Shockers: Dance (1999); The Law (2000); Roger Carbury in the BBC serial adaptation of Trollope's The Way We Live Now (2001); The Russian Bride (2001); Red Cap (2003-2004); Spooks (2005); and Sir Thomas Bertram in ITV's 2007 adaptation of Mansfield Park.
His films include Scenes of a Sexual Nature (2006); Vanity Fair (2004); Hollow Reed (1996); Saigon Baby (1995); The Trial (1993); Buddy's Song (1990); Diamond Skulls (1989); Dealers (1989); and Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance (1987) in which he played Lord Alfred Douglas.
[edit] References
- Theatre Record and its annual Indexes
- ^ See for example, his tribute to Pinter in Pinter: A Celebration (Faber and Faber, 2005), by Richard Eyre.
- ^ What's On in London, 17 April 2002: review by John Thaxter
[edit] External links
- Doug Hodge website [7]
- Douglas Hodge at the Internet Movie Database
- Costa, Maddy. "One of the girls", The Guardian, 16 January 2008. Retrieved on 2008-01-16.
