Ram John Holder
Birthday: Born in 1934-01-01 in Georgetown, British Guiana
Deathday: Alive
Guyanese actor and musician, Ram John Holder started his professional life as a folk singer in New York in the early '60s before moving to the UK to work as a musician and later an actor for Pearl Connor's Negro Theatre Workshop. His big break was as the effeminate dancer Marcus in the 1969 film Two Gentlemen Sharing and he's worked in film and TV ever since, most notably as the loveable Porkpie in Channel 4 sitcom Desmond's (1989-1994) and the shortlived spin-off Porkpie
TV Credits
Heartbeat
Character: Danny Flowers
Set during the 1960s in the fictional North Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, this enduringly popular series interweaves crime and medical storylines....
Hex
Character:
The show opens with a girl who yearns to be popular and liked in her school. She wishes she was in the "in-crowd", however, she goes about unnoticed in school everyday. The only girl who truly notices her is her best friend Thelma. For some strange reason though, Cassie feels like she is being followed by a man. This is only the beginning of her problem......
Desmond's
Character: Augustus 'Porkpie' Grant
Desmond's was a British television situation comedy broadcast by Channel 4 from 1989 to 1994. With 71 episodes, Desmond's became Channel 4's longest-running sitcom. The first series was shot in 1988, with the first episode broadcast in January 1989. The show was made in and set in Peckham, London, England and featured a predominantly Black British Guyanese cast. Conceived and co-written by Trix Worrell, and produced by Charlie Hanson and Humphrey Barclay, this series starred Norman Beaton as ba...
BBC Play of the Month
Character: Friday
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...
White Van Man
Character: Uncle Phil
The incredible misadventures of two handymen on the road and the extraordinary people they meet along the way....
Casualty
Character: George
Drama series about the staff and patients at Holby City Hospital's emergency department, charting the ups and downs in their personal and professional lives....
Beautiful People
Character: Big Barry
Beautiful People is a British comedy drama television series based on the memoirs of Barneys creative director Simon Doonan. The series takes place in Reading, Berkshire, in 1997, where thirteen-year-old Simon Doonan and his best friend Kylie dream of escaping their dreary suburban surroundings and moving to cosmopolitan London "to live amongst the beautiful people." The first episode aired on BBC Two on 2 October 2008 and recorded overnight ratings of 1.5 million viewers and positive critical r...
Death in Paradise
Character: Nelson Myers
A brilliant but idiosyncratic British detective and his resourceful local team solve baffling murder mysteries on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint-Marie....
Casualty
Character: Vivian House
Drama series about the staff and patients at Holby City Hospital's emergency department, charting the ups and downs in their personal and professional lives....
Hetty Wainthropp Investigates
Character: Chalky White
Instead of spending her golden years lying down, the indomitable Hetty Wainthropp found her calling late in life. Combining common sense, her husband, and her pocketbook, this senior sleuth takes on all the cases the police deem too minor....
Movie Credits
Joy Division
Character: Neville
A teenage orphan fights against the Red Army at the end of WWII and in the aftermath is 'adopted' by a Commissar. Years later he is sent to London during the Cold war to work for the KGB, where he questions his life....
In the Beautiful Caribbean
Character: Bredda Ordinance
Play set in the Caribbean showing how life is hard and a struggle, with problems of unemployment and lack of money....
Missing Persons
Character: Chalky White
During a visit to childhood friend Edith, retired housewife Hetty Wainthropp discovers that Edith's husband, Frank, has a son by a previous marriage. Hetty decides to turn amateur detective to trace him. When this gives her a taste for detection, Hetty decides to set up a private detective agency....
Half Moon Street
Character: Lindsay Walker
Dr. Lauren Slaughter, a research fellow at the Arab-Anglo Institute in London is utterly frustrated by her job. To supplement her income, she starts moonlighting at the Jasmine Escort Service, where she has more control over men and money than she does at the office. On one of her 'dates', Lauren meets the politician Lord Bulbeck who is trying to mediate a peace accord between the Arabs and Israelis. Bulbeck falls in love with his escort, and unwittingly, Lauren becomes a pawn in some very dirty...
The Education of Sonny Carson
Character: Preacher
A 1974 film based on the best-selling autobiography of Sonny Carson who joined a gang and committed petty crime before being sent to prison. After his release from prison he changes his life....
Song for Marion
Character: Charlie
Arthur is a grumpy pensioner who can't understand why his wife Marion would want to embarrass herself singing silly songs with her unconventional local choir. But choir director Elizabeth sees something special in the reluctant Arthur and refuses to give up on him. As she coaxes him out of his shell, Arthur realizes that it is never too late to change....
Your Christmas or Mine 2
Character: Grandad
They've swapped Christmas – again. Can Hayley and James' relationship survive another turbulent family Christmas or has their future together gone off-piste?!...
Your Christmas or Mine?
Character: Grandad
Students Hayley and James are young and in love. After saying goodbye for Christmas at a London train station, they both make the same mad split-second decision to swap trains and surprise each other. Passing each other in the station, they are completely unaware that they have just swapped Christmases....
The Jazz Detective
Character: Silver
Jazz musician Bernie Weston find himself falsely accused of murder in Bristol. With the aid of a local reporter he sets out to clear his name and find the real killer....
My Beautiful Laundrette
Character: Poet
A Pakistani Briton renovates a rundown laundrette with his male lover while dealing with drama within his family, the local Pakistani community, and a persistent mob of skinheads....
Virtual Sexuality
Character: Declan
A frustrated teenage girl creates her perfect man in a virtual reality machine and in a freak accident, gives him life....
Leo the Last
Character: Black Preacher
Prince Leo, last in the line of rulers of a long-deposed monarchy on continental Europe and jaded with the frenetic search for kicks with the European jet-set, returns to his father's London town house for rest....
Two Gentlemen Sharing
Character: Marcus
An insecure Briton and a Briton of Jamaican descent share a London apartment together....
Lucky Break
Character: Old Billy Morris
Half-way through his 12-year prison sentence for an incompetent armed robbery, Jimmy Hands gets a lucky break: he's transferred to a prison from which he can probably escape. He convinces the governor to stage a musical in an old chapel next to the prison's outer wall. He rounds up volunteer actors and puts his escape plan into production. Two other barriers, besides the wall, confront him: the arrival of a nasty inmate, John Toombes, who insists on joining the escape, and Jimmy's feelings of at...
The Calcium Kid
Character: Jamaican Barber
When milkman Jimmy Connelly accidentally puts Britain's contender for the World title out of action, he is propelled from amateur boxer to the world stage and announced as the replacement contender for the championship fight....
Britannia Hospital
Character: Radical
Britannia Hospital, an esteemed English institution, is marking its gala anniversary with a visit by the Queen Mother herself. But when investigative reporter Mick Travis arrives to cover the celebration, he finds the hospital under siege by striking workers, ruthless unions, violent demonstrators, racist aristocrats, an African cannibal dictator, and sinister human experiments....
Cuba
Character: Fat Sergeant
A British mercenary arrives in pre-Revolution Cuba to help train the corrupt General Batista's army against Castro's guerrillas while he also romances a former lover now married to an unscrupulous plantation owner....
Pressure
Character: Brother John
A British-born younger son of an immigrant family from Trinidad finds himself adrift between two cultures....
Playing Away
Character: Wilf
To mark the conclusion of their "Third World Week" celebration, a cricket team in a small English village invites a black cricket team from South London to a charity game with comical results....
Man Friday
Character: Man Friday
Play based on the tale of Robinson Crusoe, examining the relationship between Crusoe and Man Friday, with a new twist by which both characters believe they are teaching the other....
Roadrunner
Character: Trevor Ford
A young West Indian has to interrupt his rich international life to sort out some passport trouble at home. His lifestyle is very different from the simple one of his family in North London, leading to considerable tension....
City of Tiny Lights
Character: Trinidad Pete
In the teeming, multicultural metropolis of modern-day London, a seemingly straightforward missing-person case launches a down-at-heel private eye into a dangerous world of religious fanaticism and political intrigue....
The Passion of Remembrance
Character: Benjy Baptiste
Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. Set within an isolated desert landscape contrasted with recognizable scenes of the intensity of family life, this vanguard work demonstrates the richness and variety of the black experience; it is a poetic and hard-hitting commentary on the complexiti...
O Mary This London
Character: Neville
Three young Dubliners go to London in search of fun, fortune and, in the case of 17-year-old Mary Kelly, an abortion. Homeless and jobless, their adventures quickly turn sour....