Oliver Ford Davies

Oliver Ford Davies (born 12 August 1939 in Ealing, Middlesex, England) is a distinguished English actor, theatre historian, director, playwright and writer whose career spans more than six decades. He began his love of performance at age eleven when he appeared in a school production of Richard of Bordeaux, and later joined the amateur Questors company in 1956 before earning a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he read history and presided over the Oxford University Dramatic Society. After completing a DPhil and a teaching qualification, he lectured in history at the University of Edinburgh from 1964 to 1967, counting future Foreign Secretary Robin Cook among his students, before deciding to pursue acting full‑time. His professional stage debut came in the 1967 season at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre alongside future stars such as Michael Gambon and Brian Cox, and he soon forged a long association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, first appearing there in 1975 as Mountjoy in Henry V. Davies achieved critical acclaim in 1990 when he originated the lead role in David Hare’s Racing Demon at the National Theatre, a performance that earned him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. Subsequent highlights include a celebrated turn as King Lear at the Almeida Theatre (2002), Polonius in the RSC’s televised Hamlet (2008‑2009), and Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2 (2014). In addition to his stage work, he is widely recognised on screen for portraying Senator Sio Bibble in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999‑2005) and Maester Cressen in Game of Thrones (2012). His filmography also features roles in Johnny English (2003) and Triangle of Sadness (2022). Beyond performance, Davies is an accomplished author of theatre‑related non‑fiction, including Playing Lear (2003) and Performing Shakespeare (2007), and he published his memoir An Actor’s Life in 12 Productions in 2022. In 2023 his memoir won the Society for Theatre Research’s STR Theatre Book Prize, and in the 2024 New Year Honours he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama. He remains an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company and continues to contribute to the cultural life of British theatre.