John Stride

John Stride (born 11 July 1936) is an English actor best known for his television work during the 1970s.

Contents

• John stride interview
• The main chance series 1 starring john stride and kate omara
• Filmography
• References

Stride was born in London, the son of Margaret (née Prescott) and Alfred Teneriffe Stride. He attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and trained at RADA, where he met his first wife, Virginia Stride (née Thomas).

He made his first, uncredited, screen appearance in the film, Sink the Bismarck! (1960). He also played the role of Bob, the barman, in the film Bitter Harvest (1963), based on the trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton.

He made his West End debut, at the age of 18, in Five Finger Exercise. Directed by John Gielgud, and also featuring another debutante, a 16yr old Juliet Mills. It ran at the Comedy Theatre for 608 performances. He appeared at the Old Vic as Romeo in Franco Zeffirelli's long-running production of Romeo and Juliet, first staged in 1960, with Judi Dench, and also as Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part 1. At the end of the 1960s he played Rosencrantz at the Old Vic, in the National Theatre Company's production of Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stride appeared in two Shakespeare production during the 1970s made for the large and small screen respectively. In Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth (1971) he played the role of Ross. For the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII (1979) he was cast in the lead as the Tudor King.

Meanwhile, Stride had developed a career in popular television drama series. In the ITV series The Main Chance (1969–75) he played the solicitor, David Main. It is the television role with which he became most closely associated, and lasted four series. A later series also made by Yorkshire Television with Stride in the lead, Wilde Alliance (1978), lasted for only one series. He also played one of the main parts in the BBC's adaptation of Kingsley Amis's novel The Old Devils (1992).