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Childhood
At the age of fourteen he gave his first theatre performance playing Desdemona in Othello at Clifton College's Redgrave theatre; in the sixth form he also perfomed Rosencratz and Guildenstern are dead. After Clifton he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and obtained a first in English, after which he was offered a place to do a PhD. He graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983. Stage rolesRussell Beale first came to the attention of theatre-goers in the late 1980s with a series of outstanding comic performances, on occasion extremely camp, in such plays as The Man of Mode by George Etherege and Restoration by Edward Bond at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He broadened his range in the early 1990s with moving performances as Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull, as Oswald in Ibsen's Ghosts and as Edgar in King Lear. It was at the RSC that he first worked with Sam Mendes who directed him there as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, as Richard III and as a striking Ariel in The Tempest, in the last of which he revealed a fine tenor voice. Sam Mendes also directed him as Iago in Othello at the Royal National Theatre and in his farewell productions at the Donmar Warehouse, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, in which he played the title role and Twelfth Night, in which he played Malvolio.
His performance at the National as Hamlet attracted attention and provoked commentary; some considered Russell Beale an unlikely choice to embody the quintessentially youthful and contemplative hero once played by virile actors like Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Mel Gibson. Beale's performance, more restrained and conversational in nature, was a resounding success, becoming one of the most noteworthy Hamlets of recent decades. In 2007 he reprised his Broadway role as King Arthur in the Monty Python musical Spamalot at the Palace Theatre, London. Television rolesIn 1997 he portrayed the pivotal role of Kenneth Widmerpool in a television adaptation of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, for which he won the Best Actor category at the British Academy Television Awards in 1998. He also played the King of Hearts in a 1999 television adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Awards and accomplishmentsHe has won the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award three times (for his performances in Volpone, Candide and Uncle Vanya). In 2003 he was appointed CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. He is President of the Anthony Powell Society Films and TV
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