Name Thomas Wheatley | Role Actor | |
Education The King's School, Canterbury, Corpus Christi College, Oxford Movies The Living Daylights, Death at a Funeral, Where Angels Fear to Tr, Slaughterhouse of the Rising Sun, Honest - Decent and True Similar People John Glen, Nicolas Kent, Charles Sturridge, Frank Oz, Les Blair | ||
Thomas Wheatley (born Jonathan Wheatley, Essex, 1951) is an English actor.
Contents
Life
Born Jonathan Wheatley in Essex in 1951, he was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. He worked for a while in the shipping industry, in Europe, Australasia and the Far East, before deciding in 1980 to train as an actor at Drama Studio London.
Acting career
He began his professional working career with Mollie Sugden. He then performed the Edinburgh and London Fringes, including presenting his own one-man play, Beethoven. The core of his work in theatre is the canon of so-called Tribunal Plays, developed at the Tricycle Theatre by Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor. In 1994 he was William Waldegrave MP in Half the Picture, which presented edited transcripts of the Scott Inquiry (also staged in the Houses of Parliament); he played Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, in Nuremberg, which reconstructed the 1946 War Crimes Trial; he appeared in Srebrenica, an account of The Hague Tribunal’s indictment of Dr Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic; he played Inspector Groves, the senior police officer at the scene of Stephen Lawrence’s murder, in The Colour of Justice; he appeared in the Hutton Inquiry piece, Justifying War; in Bloody Sunday he played Counsel to the Saville Inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC (also in Belfast and Derry and at the Abbey Theatre Dublin); he was Prosecution Counsel Philippe Sands QC in the Tricycle’s own Hearing on Tony Blair’s involvement with Iraq, Called to Account; and in 2011, he played Gerard Elias QC, Counsel to the Baha Mousa Inquiry, in Tactical Questioning.
Other work in the theatre has been at Shakespeare’s Globe in We The People; at the Lyric Hammersmith in Neil Bartlett’s production of Oliver Twist, in The Madras House, and as The Devil in David Graham-Young’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita; at the Orange Tree Richmond in Sam Walters’s productions of The Road to Ruin and A Penny for a Song, and of Martin Crimp’s Play With Repeats; at the Lincoln Center New York in Harold Pinter’s final play Celebration; at the Almeida in Richard Eyre’s version of Sartre’s Les Mains Sales, The Novice; with English Touring Theatre in Love’s Labour’s Lost; and at the Royal Exchange Manchester in The Deep Blue Sea.
From 2009 to 2012, Thomas Wheatley worked on two Alan Bennett plays, both directed for Bath Theatre Royal by Christopher Luscombe. He played the Headmaster in The History Boys on two UK tours, and Lord Chancellor Thurlow in The Madness of George III on an English tour, and then at the Apollo Theatre in the West End. He has continued his association with Christopher Luscombe, playing in Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won in the RSC's Winter Season 2014-15.
Television
He made his television debut in 1986 in Les Blair’s improvised drama about the advertising business, Honest, Decent and True. He went on to appear in several further TV ‘single films’, including Mr Jolly Lives Next Door (directed by Stephen Frears for The Comic Strip), Harry’s Kingdom (directed by Robert Young), Michael Frayn’s First and Last (directed by Alan Dossor), Bambino Mio (directed by Ed Bennett), PD James’s The Murder Room. He was a dancing doctor in the flagship Dry Bones number in The Singing Detective, and appeared in many subsequent TV serials and series – A Perfect Hero, Selling Hitler, Aquila, Second Sight among them. He has also made guest appearances in episodes of Heartbeat, Between the Lines, Taggart, Minder, A Touch of Frost, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Foyle's War, Holby City, The Bill.
Film
His film debut came in 1987 as Saunders in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights. Twenty years on he played The Reverend in Frank Oz’s blackly comic Death at a Funeral. In 2010 in the film Mr Nice about drug smuggler Howard Marks he played John Rogers QC.
At Liberty (Book)
Thomas Wheatley’s pen name is JG Wheatley, under which he privately published a memoir entitled At Liberty in 2009. The blurb of this book reads as follows:
At Liberty paints a cubist portrait of the author’s ‘life and times’. Retracing Primo Levi’s prolonged journey home from Auschwitz in 1945, JG Wheatley intertwines an exploration of Eastern Europe’s epic quest for liberation in the 20th Century, with an intimate consideration of his own journey towards personal freedom. The book reflects upon the influence of his parents and surveys formative travels in India; it responds to the World Wars and reveals his passion for German music; it reviews a precarious career as an actor, and examines the solitary nature of the man.