Michael Pennington
Birthday: Born in 1943-06-07 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK
Deathday: Alive
Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington is a British director and actor who, together with director Michael Bogdanov, founded the English Shakespeare Company. Although primarily a stage actor, he is best known to wider audiences for his role as Moff Jerjerrod, commanding officer of the Death Star in the film Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and as Michael Foot in The Iron Lady, opposite Meryl Streep.
TV Credits
Lewis
Character: Dr. Melville
Inspector Robert Lewis and Sergeant James Hathaway solve the tough cases that the learned inhabitants of Oxford throw at them....
Silent Witness
Character: Dennis Morgan
Silent Witness is a British crime thriller series focusing on a team of forensic pathology experts and their investigations into various crimes....
Dalziel & Pascoe
Character:
British crime drama based on the "Dalziel and Pascoe" series of books by Reginald Hill, set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Wetherton. The unlikely duo of politically incorrect elephant-in-a-china-shop-copper Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell) and his more sensitive and university educated sidekick Detective Sargent, later Detective Inspector, Peter Pascoe is always on hand to solve the classic murder mystery, while maintaining a down to earth wit and humour....
Between the Lines
Character:
Detective Superintendent Tony Clark is an ambitious member of the Complaints Investigation Bureau, an internal organisation that investigates claims of corruption inside the police in England and Wales. Along the way Clark overcomes strong influence from his superiors and problems in his private life, most notably the break-up of his marriage following an affair with WPC Jenny Dean....
State of Play
Character:
The murder of Sonia Baker, a young political researcher, leads journalist Cal McCaffrey to uncover complex links between government and big business....
Callan
Character:
Callan is the title of a British television series set in the murky world of espionage. Originally produced by ABC Weekend Television and later Thames Television, it was aired on the ITV network over four seasons spread out between 1967 and 1972. The series starred Edward Woodward as David Callan, a reluctant professional killer for a shadowy branch of the British Government's intelligence services known as 'the Section'....
Waking the Dead
Character: Prof Alan Macintosh
A detective team apply new techniques to old crimes as they solve cold cases....
Trial & Retribution
Character:
Trial & Retribution is a feature-length ITV police procedural television drama series that began in 1997. It was devised and written by Lynda La Plante as a follow-on from her successful television series Prime Suspect. Each episode of the Trial & Retribution series is broadcast over two nights. The 2008 series 10 had 10 episodes, the longest run of the drama so far. The latest series was number 12 which aired in February 2009....
No Hiding Place
Character:
No Hiding Place is a British television series that was produced at Wembley Studios by Associated-Rediffusion for the ITV network between 16 September 1959 and 22 June 1967. It was the sequel to the series Murder Bag and Crime Sheet, all starring Raymond Francis as Detective Superintendent, later Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Lockhart....
The BBC Television Shakespeare
Character:
The BBC Television Shakespeare is a series of British television adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare, created by Cedric Messina and produced by BBC Television. It was transmitted in the UK from 3 December 1978 to 27 April 1985 and spanned seven series. Development of the series began in 1975 when Messina saw that Glamis Castle would make a perfect location for an adaptation of Shakespeare's play As You Like It. On returning to London, he envisioned an entire series devoted exclusivel...
BBC Play of the Month
Character: Alexei Turbin
Play of the Month is a BBC television anthology series featuring productions of classic and contemporary stage plays which were usually broadcast on BBC1. Each production featured a different work, often using prominent British stage actors in the leading roles. The series was transmitted from October 1965 to September 1983; the producer most associated with the Play of the Month was Cedric Messina. Some of the 121 episodes are missing from the archives, having been junked in the 1960s and 1970...
Summer's Lease
Character: Hugh Pargeter
Molly Pargeter is a forty-something wife and mother of three girls, who leads a stable but dull life in 1980s West London. She feels overweight and there is no passion in her relationship with her husband Hugh, who is secretly seeing another woman. For most of her life she has found escape in detective novels and books on art, especially about the fifteenth century Italian fresco painter Piero Della Francesca. Then in a newspaper's small ads Molly sees the details of a villa in Tuscany, Italy to...
Father Brown
Character: Bishop Reynard
Father Brown is based on G. K. Chesterton's detective stories about a Catholic priest who doubles as an amateur detective in order to try and solve mysteries....
Empire Warriors
Character: Narrator
Four-part documentary series about four 'wars on terror' during the final phase of the British Empire. As the Union Jack finally descended on former colonies all over the world after the Second World War, Communist, Nationalist and religious guerrilla forces saw their chance. The British Empire was leaving a dangerous power vacuum in its place. The war to succeed the British had begun....
Raised by Wolves
Character: The Trust Voice (voice)
After Earth is ravaged by a great religious war, an atheistic android architect sends two of his creations, Mother and Father, to start a peaceful, godless colony on the planet Kepler-22b. Their treacherous task is jeopardized by the arrival of the Mithraic, a deeply devout religious order of surviving humans....
The Lost World of Communism
Character:
The Lost World of Communism is a three-part British documentary series which examines the legacy of Communism twenty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Produced by Peter Molloy and Lucy Hetherington, the series takes a retrospective look at life behind the Iron Curtain between 1945 and 1989, focusing on three countries in the Eastern Bloc - East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Through film and television footage and the personal recollections of those who lived in these countries, t...
Endeavour
Character: Professor Donald Bagley
The early days of a young Endeavour Morse, whose experiences as a detective constable with the Oxford City Police will ultimately shape his future....
Freud
Character: Carl Jung
The life and times of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis....
Cracker
Character: Cdr Gordon Ellison
The wise-cracking Fitz is a brilliant but flawed criminal psychologist with a remarkable insight into the criminal mind....
Public Eye
Character: John Sheldon
Public Eye is a British television series that ran from 1965 to 1975. It was produced by ABC Television for three series, and Thames Television for a further four series. The series depicted the investigations and cases handled by the unglamorous enquiry agent Frank Marker, an unmarried loner who is in his early forties when the series begins. In the words of an ABC trailer for the third series: "Marker isn't a glamorous detective and he doesn't get glamorous cases—he doesn't even get glamorous ...
Playing Shakespeare
Character:
John Barton holds a master class in how to play Shakespeare, using members of the RSC doing scenes, sonnets, and commentary as prime examples....
The Escape Artist
Character: Judge
A chilling and bloody legal thriller that explores the line between law and justice. Will Burton, a talented junior barrister of peerless intellect and winning charm, specialises in spiriting people out of tight legal corners. He is in high demand as he has never lost a case. But when his talents acquit the notorious prime suspect in an horrific murder trial, that brilliance comes back to bite him with unexpected and chilling results, not to mention a shocking twist....
Movie Credits
Forbidden Passion: The Oscar Wilde Movie
Character:
As in earlier Oscar Wilde biopics, this version preoccupies itself with the homosexuality scandal involving Lord Alfred Douglas and his lordship's political powerful father, the Marquis of Queensbury. Arrested for corrupting Lord Douglas' morals, Wilde spends a debilitating five years in Reading Gaol, emerging a shattered shell of his former self...
Colosseum - Rome's Arena of Death
Character: Narrator (UK version) (voice)
Colosseum: Rome's Arena of Death aka Colosseum: A Gladiator's Story is a 2003 BBC Television docudrama which tells the true story of Verus a gladiator who fought at the Colosseum in Rome....
A Last Visitor for Mr. Hugh Peter
Character: John Lilburne
In prison the night before his execution, republican preacher Hugh Peter prepares to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason...
Degas and Pissario Fall Out
Character: Degas
A forgotten gem made for the British arts anthology series Without Walls, this half-hour drama imagines the two 19th century impressionist painters on a modern-day talk show–-exploring their friendship and historic conflict over the Dreyfus Affair. Resembling Patrick Watson’s Witness to History in its dramatization of the past, filmmaker Paul Morrison goes one step further by creating a behind-the-scenes world around the show; and in doing so, he offers up a clever satire, as timely as ever, on ...
Manik da: The Mystique of Pather Panchali
Character: Narrator (voice)
A biographical documentary film about the legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, to commemorate Ray's centenary year. The film covers Ray's life and early works, focusing on the making of his first film Pather Panchali....
Fragile
Character: Marcus
Haunted by memories of a patient's death, a nurse takes a job at an antiquated hospital for children. Soon she learns that the kids fear a ghost that prowls the floors and will not allow anyone to leave. Amy tries to protect them and convince the other staffers of the evil that lurks there....
The Marlowe Inquest
Character: Thomas Kyd
In an unscripted inquest, three practicing barristers interrogate actors portraying relevant figures of the 16th century in order to determine what really happened to the playwright and poet, Christopher Marlowe....
The Last Bolshevik
Character: Voice
A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century....
Return of the Jedi
Character: Moff Jerjerrod
Luke Skywalker leads a mission to rescue his friend Han Solo from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, while the Emperor seeks to destroy the Rebellion once and for all with a second dreaded Death Star....
Hamlet
Character: Laertes
Tony Richardson's Hamlet is based on his own stage production. Filmed entirely within the Roundhouse in London (a disused train shed), it is shot almost entirely in close up, focusing the attention on faces and language rather than action....
The Dinosaur Hunters
Character: William Buckland
One man who kept asking questions was Gideon Mantell, the amateur paleontologist who, in the early 19th century, fought to get the British scientific establishment to accept Britain had been inhabited by dinosaurs. As this dramatised documentary shows, Mantell had an uphill battle in a time when the biblical account of creation was considered literal truth and authorities such as the Reverend William Buckland were determined that science remain "the handmaid of religion"....
Mad Jack
Character:
Play dealing with the life of British Army lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, and his protests against the inhumanity of the First World War...
Danton's Death
Character: Saint-Just
Danton's Death is arguably the most dramatic and penetrating study of revolution ever written. Georg Büchner concentrates on that moment in 1794 when the Reign of Terror, already well established, spills over into a total blood-bath. The play, adapted by director Alan Clarke and Stuart Griffiths, both highly imaginative and closely documentary, shows how the great hero of the early phase of the Revolution, Danton, sickened by the excesses of the guillotine, which he helped to create, wants to ca...
Richard II
Character: Richard II
Shakespeare's Richard II recorded live at the Grand Theatre in Swansea, performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Henry IV: Part 1
Character: Prince Henry of Wales
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 recorded live at the Grand Theatre in Swansea, performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Henry IV: Part 2
Character: Henry Prince of Wales
Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2 performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Henry V
Character: King Henry V
Shakespeare's Henry V, performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Henry VI: House of York
Character: Jack Cade
Second part of an adapted version of Henry VI as performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Henry VI: House of Lancaster
Character: Earl of Suffolk
First part of an adapted version of Henry VI as performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
Richard III
Character: Duke of Buckingham
Shakespeare's Richard III, performed by the English Shakespeare Company as part of the complete Historical Octology....
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Character: Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is brought back to life by Watson's female descendant after being cryogenically frozen for eighty years....
The Iron Lady
Character: Michael Foot
A look at the life of Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, with a focus on the price she paid for power....
Secrets of the Universe: Great Scientists in Their Own Words
Character: Narrator (Voice)
The story of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and the discoveries they made....
Florence Nightingale
Character: Wen
Reflective drama of pioneering nurse, writer and noted statistician Florence Nightingale...
The Witches of Pendle
Character: Minister
A BBC dramatization of the Pendle witch trials of Lancashire, England that occurred in 1616....
Theban Plays: Oedipus the King
Character: Oedipus Rex
Plagues are ravaging Thebes, and the blind fortune-teller Tieresias tells Oedipus, the King, that the gods are unhappy. The murder of the former king has gone unavenged, and Oedipus sets out to find the killer....
Cymbeline
Character: Posthumus
Cymbeline, the King of Britain, is angry that his daughter Imogen has chosen a poor (but worthy) man for her husband. So he banishes Posthumus, who goes to fight for Rome. Imogen (dressed as a boy) goes in search of her husband, who meanwhile has boasted to his pal Iachimo that Imogen would never betray him. And Iachimo's determined to prove him wrong....
1945: The Savage Peace
Character: Narrator (voice)
How, in 1945, after the end of World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the defeated were atrociously mistreated, especially those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in Germany's neighboring countries, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. A heartbreaking story of revenge against innocent civilians, the story of acts as cruel as the Nazi occupation during the war years....
Royal Shakespeare Company - Richard II
Character: John of Gaunt
A monarch ordained by God to lead his people. But he is also a man of very human weakness. A man whose vanity threatens to divide the great houses of England and drag his people into a dynastic civil war that will last 100 years....
Pyramid
Character: Narrator (voice)
Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Pyramid is the only one to survive. Many believe that even with our 21st-century technology, we could not build anything like it today. Based on the most up-to-date research and the latest archaeological discoveries, here is how the Pyramid came to be....
Cracker: White Ghost
Character: Commander Gordon Ellison
A British businessman operating in Hong Kong has feelings of inferiority and turns to murder when he faces bankruptcy....
Mr and Mrs Bureaucrat
Character: E1A
Behind the façade of form-filling at the Department of Something-or-Other, careers fall and rise at the drop of an apostrophe. Will HIB's double negative be accepted, ensuring his pension prospects?...