Steven Berkoff

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Steven Berkoff (born August 3, 1937) is an English actor, writer and director. He was born in Stepney, in the East End of London, descended from a Russian Jewish family. He was educated at Hackney Downs School.

Berkoff is currently patron at the Nightingale Theatre, home of the Prodigal Theatre Company in Brighton.

Contents 1 Work in the theatre 2 Work as an actor 3 References 4 Trivia 5 External links

Work in the theatre

Berkoff is a playwright, actor and theatre director. In the 1970s and 1980s he wrote a series of verse plays including: East (1975), Greek (1980), Decadence (1981) and West (1983). Other plays in verse are: Sink the Belgrano! (1986), a critical take on the Falklands War; Massage (1997); Sturm und Drang and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001).

He has made several adaptations of Kafka's work: The Metamorphosis (1969), In the Penal Colony (1969) and The Trial (1971). In the late 1980s he directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde in the Gate Theatre, Dublin and later in the UK.

He trained in mime and physical theatre alongside Jacques Lecoq in Paris and also at Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His key theatrical influences are Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud and Jacques Lecoq.^{[citation needed]}

He is an exponent of the style of heightened physical theatre for which the term 'total theatre' has been coined.

Work as an actor

In Hollywood he took villainous roles such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop; a gangster in The Krays; and the sadistic Soviet officer Col. Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II. He appeared in the James Bond film Octopussy as General Orlov. He was cast by Stanley Kubrick as a police officer in A Clockwork Orange and a gambler nobleman (Lord Ludd) in Barry Lyndon. He appears in the independent feature Naked in London (2006).

As a television actor, an early TV role was in an episode of The Avengers. An early regular role was as a Moonbase Interceptor pilot in the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO. He has also appeared in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Hagath in the episode Business as Usual; in the miniseries Children of Dune as Stilgar; as a gangster (Mr Wiltshire) in episode 8 of the BBC's Hotel Babylon series; as a lawyer (Freddie Eccles) in an episode of ITV's Marple entitled By the Pricking of My Thumbs and as Adolf Hitler in the mini-series War and Remembrance.

References

• Robert Cross, Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance (Manchester University Press, 2004)

Trivia

• He had a top 20 hit in the U.K. with dance band N-Trance called "The Mind Of The Machine".
• He is no relation to new media practitioner Steven "Perkoff" Berkoff.

Wikipedia information about Steven Berkoff This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Steven Berkoff". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.