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Peter Firth (born October 27 1953 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, UK) is a British actor, well known for a variety of starring roles in film and on television from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Career

Early career

Firth was a leading child actor by 1970, starring in the Flaxton Boys as Archie Weekes and a cult television series called Here Come the Double Deckers, which featured British child actors in the leading roles. Firth played Scooper, the leader of the gang. In 1973, he starred in the London stage version of Peter Shaffer's play Equus, playing a teenager being treated by a psychiatrist. Every night he would remove all his clothes and reveal his penis in extended full frontal nude scenes.

His first major role as an adult was in the title role in a 1976 BBC Television Play of the Month adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The adaptation was scripted by John Osborne and also starred Jeremy Brett and John Gielgud, becoming a major success with the critics. That same year saw the release of the World War I film Aces High which featured Firth as the inexperienced RAF pilot Lt. Croft. Coincidentally, Aces High also starred John Gielgud, as well as Malcolm McDowell.

The following year, Firth starred in Equus, the film adaptation of the play in which he had starred on Broadway. The film was a success and earned Firth a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and victory in the same category at the Golden Globe Awards. Further film work quickly followed, most notably Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Film

Subsequent film work has included roles in Lifeforce (1985), Letter to Brezhnev (1985), The Hunt for Red October (1990), White Angel (playing mild mannered dentist Leslie Steckler, 1993, directed by Chris Jones), Pearl Harbor (2001), and The Greatest Game Ever Played (playing Lord Northcliffe, 2005).

Television

In parallel to his film career, Firth has continued to appear in various television productions, with several notable credits in various high-profile dramas. In 1980 he starred as the eponymous time traveller in the BBC's feelgood science-fiction play The Flipside of Dominick Hide, and two years later starred in a sequel, Another Flip for Dominick. Both of these were made as part of the BBC's famous Play for Today anthology drama strand. More recently, he has starred as senior MI5 officer Harry Pearce in the BBC's popular spy drama series Spooks (2002-present), and played Fred Hoyle in Hawking, a BBC dramatisation of the early career of Stephen Hawking.

Audiobooks

Firth has played many roles in theatre, film and television but is also a noted narrator of audio books. He has been responsible for performances reading Pat Barker's Regeneration, The Ghost Road and The Eye in the Door, Suspicion by Robert McCrum, Maurice by E. M. Forster, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

External links

• peterfirth.co.uk Peter Firth Fansite

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