Douglas_Hodge

Douglas Hodge

Douglas Hodge (born 1960) is a British actor, director, and musician who trained for the stage at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).

He is a council member of the National Youth Theatre for whom, in 1989, he co-wrote Pacha Mama's Blessing about the Amazon rain forests staged at the Almeida Theatre. He is also an Associate Director of the Donmar Warehouse.

Personal background and family life

Douglas Hodge was born in 1960, in Plymouth, Devon, England, UK. One of his grandmothers was visually impaired, and he is a celebrity supporter of the Royal National Institute of Blind People and its "Talking Books" project.. He has an older brother who "manages a construction firm."

Douglas and his family moved to Wigmore near Gillingham, Kent during the 1960's. He attended Fairview Primary School and from there The Howard School in Rainham, Kent.

He and his partner, actress Tessa Peake-Jones (who played his on screen mother in an episode of Only Fools and Horses), have had two children, a daughter (born c. 1992) and a son (born c. 2001), and they live near Oxford.

Career

Theatre

Harold Pinter

Hodge has achieved great success on stage in plays by Harold Pinter, including: No Man's Land at the Comedy Theatre in February 1993; Moonlight at the Almeida Theatre in September 1993; A Kind of Alaska, The Lover and The Collection at the Donmar Warehouse in May 1998; as Jerry in Betrayal at the Royal National Theatre's Lyttelton Theatre, in November 1998; and as Aston in The Caretaker at the Comedy Theatre in November 2000, co-starring Michael Gambon (Davies) and Rupert Graves (Mick), directed by Patrick Marber.

Hodge admires Pinter and speaks and writes very highly of him and his work, offering him as a "birthday present" on his 70th birthday, among many other things: "My own complete friendship, loyalty and thanks. Manners, civility, celerity, precision, class and clarity.

As his directorial debut at the Oxford Playhouse in 2004 Hodge chose a double bill of The Dumb Waiter and Other Pieces (the 1957 one-act play plus six of Pinter's sketches).

Other work

For the National Theatre in May 1994 Hodge 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.

He played Leontes in an RSC revival of The Winter's Tale at the Roundhouse 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..

In April 2003 he portrayed Andrei in Michael Blakemore's revival of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the Playhouse Theatre. The following year he made his Royal Court debut as Barry in Joe Penhall's study of entrapment journalism Dumb Show, directed by Terry Johnson, which opened in September 2004 to positive reviews, particularly for Hodge's performance as a television comedian whose career is on the skids.

Hodge appeared in the 2005 revival of Guys and Dolls at the Piccadilly Theatre playing Nathan Detroit opposite Ewan McGregor's Sky Masterson

During the summer of 2006, he took the title role in a bloodstained revival of Titus Andronicus, at Shakespeare's Globe. Simultaneously he was also making his West End directorial debut with See How They Run, a 1940's wartime farce by Philip King, preceded by a successful UK tour When his production opened In the West End Nancy Carroll took over from Hattie Morahan in the role of the vicar’s young wife

In May 2007 he revealed a fine lyric tenor voice as Frank, the neurosurgeon in A Matter of Life and Death with the Kneehigh Theatre company at the National Theatre, a spectacular production with music, based on events in the movie of the same name. 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 (and his "alter ego", "the inimitable" Drag queen "Zaza") in the 1983 musical La Cage aux Folles (book by Harvey Fierstein), at the Menier Chocolate Factory

As Maddy Costa noted in her Guardian profile of Hodge:

Before he became a bona fide actor, Douglas Hodge did impersonations of comedians and other famous people in working men's clubs, an act he once toured round Nato bases in Europe. There, he shared the stage with a troupe of dancing girls, the memory of which makes his blue eyes glitter. "The girls running off stage, with their fishnets and high heels and spidery eyelashes, chucking their clothes on the floor, the smell of them, the coarseness of it, was the sexiest thing." He pauses, frowns. "And now I'm backstage with the dancing girls doing all that."

Television

With Peter Searles he co-wrote Pacha Mama's Blessing and Forest People, about the Amazon Rainforest, performed by the National Youth Theatre on BBC Television in 1989

Hodge received critical and popular acclaim in 1994 as Dr. Tertius Lydgate in the BBC's award-winning production Middlemarch, directed by Anthony Page and adapted by Andrew Davies from the novel by George Eliot. In the US it aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1994.

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); the BBC serial adaptation of Trollope's The Way We Live Now (2001), as Roger Carbury; The Russian Bride (2001); Red Cap (2003-2004); Spooks (2005); ITV's 2007 adaptation of Mansfield Park, as Sir Thomas Bertram; and the made-for-TV film film Lift, directed by James Hawes (Doctor Who), a 2007 Hartswood Films production for BBC Four, as Paul Sykes, "a constantly exasperated, highly-strung middle-aged businessman with commitments."

Selected filmography

Feature films in which he has acted include:

1987 – Ken Russell's Salome's Last Dance, in which he plays Lord Alfred Douglas;
1989 – Dealers;
1989 – Diamond Skulls;
1990 – Buddy's Song;
1993 – The Trial, directed by David Jones
1995 – Saigon Baby;
1996 – Hollow Reed;
2005 – Vanity Fair;
2006 – Scenes of a Sexual Nature.

He made his cinematic directorial debut with a short film of Harold Pinter's dramatic sketch Victoria Station.

Music

As Doug Hodge, he recorded a debut music album Cowley Road Songs in 2006.

"I've been writing songs all my life but - apart from the occasional girlfriend late at night - I'd never sung them to anyone. Then last year 2006 I finally started playing at various venues in and around Oxford. Each time I wrote a new song I'd go down the Ex [on Cowley Road] and sing it... Then rightback records asked me to record them. We went into the Blue Moon Studios in Banbury for just four days. This [Cowley Road Songs] is what we came out with....": Douglas Hodge