Steven Berkoff

Steven Berkoff
Born	Leslie Steven Berks
Years active	1959–present
Spouse(s)	Shelley Lee (August 1976; divorced)
Partner	Clara Fisher
Website	http://www.stevenberkoff.com/

Steven Berkoff (born 3 August 1937) is an English actor, writer and director.

Personal background, education, and training

Berkoff was born Leslie Steven Berks in Stepney, in the East End of London, on 3 August 1937, the son of Pauline (Hyman) and Alfred Berks (Berkovitch), who was a tailor. He attended Raine's Foundation Grammar School from 1948 to 1950, Hackney Downs School, and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, in 1958, and at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, in Paris, in 1965.

He lives with his companion Clara Fisher in East London.

Career

Theatre

As well as being an actor, Berkoff is a playwright and director.

His earliest plays are adaptations of works by Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1969); In the Penal Colony (1969); and The Trial (1971); these complex psychological plays are nightmarish and create a disturbing sense of alienation in their audiences.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote a series of verse plays including: East (1975); Greek (1980); Decadence (1981); West (1983); Sink the Belgrano! (1986); Massage (1997); Sturm und Drang; and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001).

Critic Ned Chaillett has described Sink the Belgrano!, a critical take on the Falklands War, which premiered at the Half Moon Theatre, in Stepney, on 2 September 1986, as "a diatribe in punk-Shakespearean verse"; and Berkoff himself described it as "even by my modest standards ... one of the best things I have done" (Free Association 373).

Berkoff employs a style of heightened physical theatre known as "total theatre". Drama critic Aleks Sierz describes his Berkoff's dramatic style as "in yer face":

the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent. At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen, and want all their friends to see it too. It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation."

In the late 1980s, he directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and later in the United Kingdom.

In 1998 his solo play Shakespeare's Villains, produced and co-directed by Marc Sinden at London's Haymarket Theatre, was nominated for a Society of London Theatre Olivier Award as "Best Entertainment". Berkoff and Sinden worked together again in 1999 on the 25th anniversary revival of East, which was produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, at the Theatre de Silvia Monfort, Paris, and at the Vaudeville Theatre, in London's West End.

Film and television

In Hollywood films, Steven Berkoff has played villains such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop; a gangster in The Krays; the sadistic Soviet officer Col. Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II; and General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy. He also appeared in the 1967 Hammer film Prehistoric Women and in the 1980 true-to-life prison break-out McVicar alongside Roger Daltrey. He played a police officer and a gambler nobleman (Lord Ludd) in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, respectively. He also appears in the independent feature Naked in London (2006).

In 1990 Berkoff appeared in the biopic on the early life of Errol Flynn entitled Flynn (also known in some territories as My Forgotten Man).

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 2003 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. Berkoff also appeared as himself in the "Science" episode of the British current affairs satire Brass Eye (1997), warning against the dangers of the (fictional) environmental disaster "Heavy Electricity."

Other work

Berkoff provided a spoken voiceover for a top 20 hit in the U.K. by dance band N-Trance called "The Mind Of The Machine" in 1998 and was mentioned in the lyrics of the Brian May track "I'm Scared" from the album "Back to the Light".

Berkoff starred in the opening sequence to Sky Sports' coverage of the 2007 Heineken Cup Final with a performance based on an Al Pacino speech from the 1999 film Any Given Sunday.

Most recently, he provided motion capture and voice alongside Andy Serkis and others for the PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword. He played General Flying Fox, one of the main villains in the game.

He made a brief cameo appearance in the 2008 film The Cottage, also with Serkis.

He starred in the British Heart Foundation's two-minute short film, Watch Your Own Heart Attack, broadcast on 10 August 2008 on ITV.

Sponsorship

Berkoff is patron of the Nightingale Theatre, in Brighton, England, a fringe theatre venue which is home of the Prodigal Theatre Company]].

Awards, award nominations, and other honours

• L.A. Weekly Theater Award: Solo Performance, Shakespeare's Villains (2000).
• The Berkoff Performing Arts Centre was named for him at Alton College, in North East Hampshire on 20 June 2008.

Attending the Alton College ceremony honouring him, he stated:

I remember in my younger days questioning what life means. Finding a place like the Berkoff Performing Arts Centre, I found myself as a person. Having a place like this sowed the seeds of the man I think I am today. A place like this is the first step in changing the life of a person.
There's something about theatre that draws people together because it's something connected with the human soul. All over the UK, the performing arts links people with a shared humanity as a way to open the doors to the mysteries of life. We should never underestimate the power of the theatre. It educates, informs, enlightens and humanises us all.

He taught a drama masterclass later that day and performed his Shakespeare's Villains for an invited audience of 100 that evening.

Berkoff v. Burchill

In 1996 Berkoff prevailed as a defendant in Berkoff v. Burchill, a libel civil action which he brought against Sunday Times journalist Julie Burchill, after she published comments suggesting that he was "hideously ugly"; the judge ruled for Berkoff, finding that Burchill's actions "held him to ridicule and contempt."

References

• Billington, Michael. "Happy Birthday, Steven Berkoff". The Guardian Theatre Blog. August 3, 2007. ("The hard man with a sensitive soul is 70 today. I've always admired him as an actor, director and - above all - phenomenon.")
• Cross, Robert. Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. ISBN 0719062543 (10). ISBN 9780719062544 (13). (Synopis at Google Books, with hyperlinked table of contents and limited preview.)
• Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. ISBN 0571200494 (10). ISBN 9780571200498 (13).
• "Steven Berkoff". Contemporary Writers. British Council. Accessed 30 Sept. 2008.

External links

• Steven Berkoff –Official site.
• Steven Berkoff at IMDb.
• "Steven Berkoff (1937 - )" in The Playwrights Database at Doolee.com.

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