Detailed Biography

Peter Firth is an English actor. He is well known for a variety of starring roles in film and on television from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Early career

Firth was a leading child actor by mid 1970, starring in the Flaxton Boys as Archie Weekes and the Here Come the Double Deckers series, which featured child actors in the leading roles. Firth played Scooper, the leader of the gang. In July 1973, he starred in the London stage version of Peter Shaffer's play Equus, playing a teenager being treated by a psychiatrist, and in October 1974 repeated the role in the Broadway production, receiving a Tony Award nomination for his performance as Alan Strang. In May 1981 he appeared on Broadway again in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus as Mozart. He was the first replacement in that role which Tim Curry had originated in New York. Shaffer had offered him the role in the original London production but he was unavailable due to film commitments.

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 RFC pilot Lt Croft. Aces High also starred John Gielgud, as well as Malcolm McDowell.

The following year, Firth starred in the film adaptation of Equus, the play in which he had starred in London and 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 , an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Film

Other film work has included roles in When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder? , Lifeforce , Letter to Brezhnev , Northanger Abbey , The Hunt for Red October , White Angel , Pearl Harbor , and The Greatest Game Ever Played .

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 , and played Fred Hoyle in Hawking, a BBC dramatisation of the early career of Stephen Hawking.

Firth has also appeared on American and Canadian television, on programmes such as Law and Order: SVU and Total Recall 2070, as well as in television films such as The Incident starring Walter Matthau.

Audiobooks

Firth is also a 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.

Personal life

Firth was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, the son of Mavis and Eric Macintosh Firth. On Friday 17 July 2009, Peter was awarded an Honorary degree by the University of Bradford as a Doctor of letters for his services to acting. Peter was nominated by the School of Computing, Informatics & Media and received his award during the school's degree ceremony.