Jonathan Pryce, CBE (born 1 June 1947) is a
Welsh
stage and film actor/singer. After studying at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art and marrying English actress
Kate
Fahy in 1974, he began his career as a stage actor in the
1970s.
His
work in theatre, including an award-winning performance in the
title role of the Royal Court Theatre
's Hamlet, led to
several supporting roles in film and television. He made his
breakthrough screen performance in
Terry
Gilliam's 1985
cult film Brazil.
Critically lauded for his versatility, Pryce has participated in
big-budget productions such as
Evita,
Tomorrow Never Dies,
Pirates of the Caribbean
and
The New World, as
well as independent projects such as
Glengarry Glen Ross and
Carrington.
His career in theatre
has also been prolific, and he has won two Tony Awards—the first in 1977 for his Broadway
debut in
Comedians, the second for
his 1991 role as "the Engineer" in the musical Miss
Saigon.
Early life
Pryce was
born John Price in Holywell
, Flintshire, Wales, UK
, the son of Margaret Ellen (née Williams), a retail cashier and
shopkeeper, and Isaac Price, a coal miner who also ran a small
general grocery shop. Pryce has two older sisters.
He was
educated at Holywell Grammar School (today Holywell High
School
), and, at the age of 16, he went to art college and
then started training to be a teacher at Edge Hill
College
in Ormskirk
. At
some point he changed the spelling of his last name from Price to
Pryce. While studying, he took part in a college theatre
production. An impressed friend sent off to the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
for an application form, and Pryce was awarded a scholarship to
RADA. While at RADA Pryce worked as a door-to-door salesman of
velvet paintings. Pryce was part of
'new wave’ of actors to emerge from the Academy. Others included
Bruce Payne,
Juliet Stevenson,
Alan Rickman,
Anton
Lesser,
Kenneth Branagh and
Fiona Shaw.
Despite
finding RADA "straight-laced", and being told by his tutor that he
could never aspire to do more than playing villains in Z-Cars,
he graduated and went on to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at
the Nottingham
Playhouse
. He then joined the Everyman
Theatre Liverpool Company
, eventually
becoming the theatre's Artistic Director. While working at
the Everyman Theatre Pryce met Irish actress
Kate Fahy.
The two married in 1974 and based their home
in the Hampstead
area of London, where they currently live with
their three children: Patrick (b.1983), Gabriel (b.1986) and Phoebe
(b.1990). It is during this time that he made his first
screen appearance in a minor role on a 1972 episode of the British
science fiction
programme
Doomwatch, called
Fire & Brimstone. It was not until 1976, however, that
he got his first movie role, playing the character Joseph Manasse
in the film drama
Voyage of the
Damned, starring
Faye Dunaway.
He did not, however, abandon the stage, appearing from 1978 to 1979
on the Royal Shakespeare Company's productions of
The Taming of the Shrew as
Petruchio, and on
Antony and Cleopatra as
Octavius Caesar.
1980s
In 1980,
his performance in the title role of
Hamlet at the Royal Court
Theatre won him an Olivier
Award, and was acclaimed by some critics as the definitive
Hamlet of his generation. That year he also appeared in the
film
Breaking Glass, a film
that is remarkable in that it featured in the cast (sometimes in
small roles) many actors who would eventually become stars of film
and television, such as
Jim Broadbent,
Richard Griffiths and
Phil Daniels. Also during this year, Pryce had
a small but pivotal role as Zarniwoop in the 12th episode of the
Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy radio series, one that he reprised for
the
Quintessential Phase which was broadcast in 2005.
In 1983, Pryce played the role of the sinister Mr. Dark in
Something
Wicked This Way Comes, based on the
Ray Bradbury novel of the same
title. After appearing mostly in TV films, such as the
Ian McEwan-scripted
The Ploughman's Lunch, and
Martin Luther,
Heretic, he achieved a breakthrough with his role as the
subdued
protagonist Sam Lowry in
Terry Gilliam's 1985 film,
Brazil. The film, set in a
world similar to the one depicted in
Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four, was
acclaimed in Europe and won two
BAFTA Film
Awards. In the American version,
Universal Pictures tried to remove
numerous scenes in order to make the film shorter and more
consumer-friendly, though they eventually relented. The movie was
also well received in the United States and won three awards from
the
Los Angeles
Film Critics Association and two
Academy Award nominations.
Brazil
has since become a
cult film, and is still
frequently mentioned in "best film" lists and rankings, such as
Time magazine's list of the
100 best films of all time and
Total
Film magazine's 2004 list of the 20 greatest British
movies of all time (which
Brazil topped). The film was
described by
Harlan Ellison as "the
finest
SF movie ever made" and it
holds a 98% freshness rate at
Rotten
Tomatoes. After
Brazil, Pryce appeared in the
historical thriller
The Doctor and the Devils and then in
the
Gene Wilder-directed film
Haunted Honeymoon.
During
this period of his life, Pryce continued to perform on stage, and
was particularly noteworthy as the successful but self-doubting
writer Trigorin in a London
production
of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in late 1985. From 1986
to 1987 Pryce played the
lead
part on the
Royal
Shakespeare Company's production of
Macbeth, which also starred
Sinéad Cusack as
Lady Macbeth.
In 1988 Pryce worked once again with Gilliam in
The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen, playing "
The
Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson". The film was a notorious
financial
fiasco, with production costing
more than $40 million, when the original budget was $23.5 million.
The film has gained cult favorite status over time, however, and in
a commentary track on the
DVD edition of his
2007 feature
Tideland,
Gilliam now says that
Munchausen is one of the films that
his fans most often cite as a favorite (along with
Monty Python and the Holy
Grail,
Brazil,
Twelve Monkeys and
Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas).
The following year Pryce appeared in
three of the earliest episodes of the improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway?,
alongside Paul Merton and John Sessions., and in another play by
Chekhov, this time Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville
Theatre
.
1990s
After some minor roles in the big screen, such as in the
independent film Glengarry Glen Ross and in
Scorsese's
The Age of Innocence, Pryce
discovered he wanted to do
musicals
after seeing his friend
Patti LuPone on
the original London production of
Les Misérables.
He would
successfully return to the stage originating the role of The
Engineer, an Eurasian
pimp in the award winning West
End
musical Miss
Saigon. His performance was praised in England, but
when the production transferred to Broadway the Actors'
Equity Association (AEA) would not allow Pryce to portray the
Engineer because, according to their executive secretary, "[t]he
casting of a Caucasian actor made up
to appear Asian is an affront to the
Asian community". Cameron
Mackintosh, the show's producer, decided to cancel the $10
million New York production because, he said, he would not let the
freedom of artistic expression be attacked. Realizing that its
decision would result in the loss of many jobs, the AEA decided to
make a deal with Mackintosh, allowing Pryce to appear in the
production. He would then, in 1991, win a
Tony Award for his performance. Pryce returned to
the London stage the following year to star alongside
Elaine Paige in the 1992 revival of the
Federico Fellini-inspired musical
Nine.
In 1993 Pryce featured, alongside
Kathy
Burke and
Minnie Driver, in the
BBC mini-series
Mr. Wroe's Virgins. Later that same
year Pryce was nominated for a
Primetime Emmy Award and for a
Golden Globe Award for his work as
Henry Kravis in the
HBO
produced
made-for-TV movie
Barbarians at the
Gate. Also during 1993, Pryce was set to star alongside
River Phoenix and
Judy Davis in the film
Dark Blood, but production had to be shut
down when, 11 days shy of completing production, Phoenix died of a
drug overdose.
Director George Sluizer, who owns the rights to what
has been filmed, has made available some of the raw material, which
features Pryce and Phoenix on a field in Utah
, on his
personal website. Between 1993 and 1994, Pryce became a
spokesman for
Infiniti in a series of
American television commercials, notably for the
Infiniti J30. These advertisements were widely
ridiculed because of the campaign's general "snobiness". These
commercials were parodied on
Saturday Night Live in 1993, with
Mike Myers doing an impersonation
of Pryce, spokesmodeling for sleek luxury
toilets instead of automobiles. In 1994, Pryce
portrayed
Fagin in a revival of the musical
Oliver!, and would star the
following year alongside
Emma Thompson
in the film
Carrington,
which centres on a
platonic
relationship between
gay writer
Lytton Strachey and painter
Dora Carrington. Pryce's portrayal of
Strachey gained him the
Best Actor Award at
the
1995 Cannes Film
Festival.
The following year Pryce starred with
Madonna and
Antonio Banderas in his first
musical film,
Evita.
In this Oscar-winning adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical, Pryce portrayed the Argentinian
dictator Juan
Peron. The movie's
soundtrack was an international success.
It contains over 30 songs sung mainly by Madonna, Banderas and
Pryce, of which two are solos for Pryce: "She Is A Diamond" and "On
The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada". Both his acting and his singing
received mixed reviews from the press. After
Evita, Pryce
went on to portray a
James Bond
arch-villain, the power-mad, billionaire media mogul
Elliot Carver, in the 1997 film
Tomorrow Never Dies. During the
rest of the decade Pryce would play to his new acquired villain
fame, portraying an
assassin in
Ronin, a corrupt
Cardinal in the controversial
Stigmata and, for
Comic Relief,
the Master in the
Doctor Who special,
Doctor Who and the Curse
of Fatal Death. In 1998, Pryce performed in
Cameron Mackintosh's gala concert
Hey, Mr Producer!, as Professor Henry Higgins from
My Fair Lady and reprising his
role as the Engineer from
Miss Saigon.
2000s
During the early 2000s Pryce starred and participated in a variety
of movie flops, such as
The Affair of the
Necklace,
What a
Girl Wants,
Unconditional Love and
Terry Gilliam's unfinished
The Man Who Killed Don
Quixote. While his on-screen projects were failing,
however, the 2001 London stage production of
My Fair Lady and his portrayal of
Professor Henry Higgins was being acclaimed by the media. This
production turned up to be very stressful for Pryce because
Martine McCutcheon, who portrayed
Eliza Doolittle, was sick during much of the shows run. McCutcheon
was replaced by her understudy Alexandra Jay who would also fall
sick hours before a performance forcing her understudy
Kerry Ellis to take the lead. Pryce was
extremely upset and on her first night introduced Ellis to the
audience before the show by saying "This will be your first Eliza.
Well, this is my third this week. Any member of the audience
interested in playing Eliza can find applications at the door.
Wednesday and Saturday matinee available." Pryce ended up dealing
with four Elizas during the course of 14 months. Nevertheless, the
show was nominated for four
Laurence Olivier Awards on 2001: Best
Actress in a Musical for Martine McCutcheon, Outstanding Musical
Production, Best Theatre Choreographer and Best Actor in a Musical
for Pryce. Pryce lost to
Philip Quast,
although McCutcheon won in her category. Pryce did express interest
in doing
My Fair Lady in New York, but when asked if he
would do it with McCutcheon he said that "there's as much chance of
me getting a date with
Julia Roberts
as doing
My Fair Lady in New York with Martine
McCutcheon".
In April 2003 Pryce returned to the non-musical stage with
A
Reckoning, written by American dramatist Wesley Moore.
The play
co-starred Flora Montgomery and
after premiering at the Soho Theatre
in London was described by The Daily Telegraph as "one of the
most powerful and provocative new American plays to have opened
since David Mamet's Oleanna." That year Pryce also
landed a role in
Pirates
of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, where he
portrayed a fictional
Governor of
Jamaica,
Weatherby Swann, a
movie he described as "one of those why-not movies". After
Pirates Pryce has appeared in several large-scale
productions, such as
De-Lovely
(Pryce's second musical film), a chronicle of the life of
songwriter
Cole Porter, for which
Kevin Kline and Pryce covered a Porter
song called "Blow, Gabriel, Blow",
The Brothers Grimm, Pryce's
fourth project with Terry Gilliam, starred
Matt Damon and
Heath
Ledger, and
The New
World, in which he had a minor role as
King James I. In 2005, Pryce was
nominated for another
Olivier
Award in the best actor category for his role in the 2004
London production of
The
Goat or Who is Sylvia?, where he played Martin, a
goat-lover that has to face the recriminations of his cheated-on
wife, played by his real life wife
Kate
Fahy. Pryce's performance was highly praised, but he lost the
Olivier to
Richard
Griffiths.
The following year, Pryce voiced over the French adult
animated film,
Renaissance, which he stated wanted
to do because he had never "done something quite like it before".
That same year he reprised the role of Governor Weatherby Swann for
the
Pirates of the Caribbean sequels,
Pirates of the
Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and
Pirates of the
Caribbean: At World's End. Both were filmed at the same
time but released a year apart. Also, during 2006, Pryce returned
to the Broadway stage replacing
John
Lithgow, from January to July, as Lawrence Jameson in the
musical version of
Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels. During early 2007 Pryce played
Sherlock Holmes in a TV miniseries, the BBC
production
Sherlock Holmes
and the Baker Street Irregulars.
From September 2007
through June 2008, he returned to the theatre scene appearing as
Shelly Levene in a new West End production of David
Mamet's Glengarry Glen
Ross at London's Apollo Theatre
. He Later appeared in the
BBC 3 comedy series
Clone as Dr. Victor Blenkinsop also
starring
Stuart McLoughlin and
Mark Gatiss.
Pryce was appointed
Commander of the
Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Birthday
Honours.
Work
Stage
Incomplete list
Filmography
Other projects, contributions
References
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Retrieved on 10 November 2007.
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November 2007.
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Guardian. Retrieved on 9 December 2007.
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2007.
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(French)
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or Who is Sylvia?". Curtain Up. Retrieved on 19
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times". This Is London. Retrieved on 15 June
2008.
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