Full Name Allan G. Royal Name Allan Royal | Years active 1967–present Role Actor | |
Born August 17, 1944 (age 79) ( 1944-08-17 ) Montreal, Canada Nominations Gemini Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role Movies and TV shows The Good Witch, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Night Heat, They Came from Outer Space, Switching Channels Similar People Martyn Burke, Sonny Grosso, Mario Philip Azzopardi, Donald Shebib, Reto Salimbeni | ||
Allan Royal (born August 17, 1944) is a Montreal-born actor, who is also sometimes credited as Allan G. Royal and Alan Royal. He is known for playing the crime reporter Tom Kirkwood on the hit Canadian police drama Night Heat from 1985–1989. He is also known for his recurring role on such programs as the American TV drama Falcon Crest as well as roles in numerous other TV shows, movies, and plays.
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Early career
Royal grew up in a bilingual home: his father was French Canadian and his mother was of British ancestry. He grew up in Montreal's West End, where from the time he was a boy, he wanted to be in show business. He began performing while still in high school, and ultimately left Montreal to study acting in New York with Lee Strasberg. He returned to Canada, performing on stage in Toronto beginning in the mid-1960s. He joined the Toronto Arts Production theater company, where he played a wide range of roles throughout the 1970s, in new plays as well as productions of Shakespeare and Moliere.
Television and movie career
In 1985, Royal joined the cast of a new television production, Night Heat, which aired on both Canadian and American TV. Night Heat also starred Canadian actors Scott Hylands and Jeff Wincott. Royal's character, Tom Kirkwood, wrote a column about crime, and he also was the narrator, doing a voice-over at the beginning and a concluding thought at the end of each episode. At the time, Royal, who was mainly known in Canada for his stage performances, was unknown to American audiences. But the success of Night Heat helped introduce him, and led to other work after the show ended in 1989. Prior to the end of Night Heat, he had moved to Los Angeles, where he hoped to get into movies; he had no plans to do another TV program, but the opportunity for the role of reclusive novelist R.D. Young on Falcon Crest appealed to him. After playing the role for a year, he appeared in a comedy-science fiction show called They Came From Outer Space from 1990-1991, and another TV series, Foreign Affairs, in 1992–93.
Throughout the late 1980s well into the 2010s, Royal has worked steadily, appearing in productions that were made in the US and several that were made in Canada, such as the 1988 film Switching Channels, a remake of the 1931 movie classic Front Page, which was filmed in Toronto. In addition, he was in several made-for-TV movies, including a role as John Sculley in the 1999 production Pirates of Silicon Valley, and the role of Mark Roberts in the 1999 production of "Crime in Connecticut: The Story of Alex Kelly" (later renamed "Cry Rape"). Royal also portrayed Captain Braxton in two 1996 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager: "Future's End, Parts I and II". In addition, Royal appeared in other TV roles, among which the 1987 mini-series Amerika, Forever Knight, Mutant X, Relic Hunter, The Practice, JAG. The Border, in a 2004 episode of Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye, the 2008 Hallmark Channel production of The Good Witch; he played Chief Constable Stockton in the Canadian detective show Murdoch Mysteries, in 2008, 2010, and 2014; and he played Judge Phillip Hopkins in three 2014 episodes of the USA Network hit show Suits.
In 2011, he returned to the stage in Toronto, where he had not performed live since the early 1980s, to star in a one-man play, "The Disappearing Act." He was not only the star, but he also wrote the script, about a man on death row.