Steven Berkoff

Steven Berkoff (born Leslie Steven Berks; born 3 August 1937) is a British actor, author, playwright, practitioner, and theatre director. As a film actor, he is best known for his performances in villainous roles, including the portrayals of Lt. Col Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II, General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy, Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, and Adolf Hitler in the TV mini-series War and Remembrance.[1][2][3]

Steven Berkoff
Born
Leslie Steven Berks

(1937-08-03) 3 August 1937
Stepney, London, England
EducationRaine's Foundation Grammar School
Hackney Downs School
Alma materWebber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art
L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq
OccupationActor, playwright, and theatre director
Years active1958–present
Notable work
Sink the Belgrano! (1986)
Shakespeare's Villains (1998)
Spouse(s)
Shelley Lee
(
m. 1976)
(divorced)
Partner(s)Clara Fisher
AwardsTotal Theatre Lifetime Achievement Award (1997)
LA Weekly Theater Award for Solo Performance (2000)
Websitehttp://www.stevenberkoff.com/

Early life

Berkoff was born Leslie Steven Berks on 3 August 1937, in Stepney in the East End of London,[1] the son of Pauline (née Hyman), a housewife, and Alfred Berks, a tailor.[4] His family was Jewish, with roots in Romania and Russia.[5][6] The family name was originally Berkoff, but had been anglicised to Berks in order to aid the family's assimilation into Britain. Berkoff later legally changed his surname to the original family name, and went by his middle name.[7]

Berkoff attended Raine's Foundation Grammar School (1948–50),[8] Hackney Downs School,[9] the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (1958), and L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (1965).[10]

Career

Theatre

Berkoff started his theatre training in the Repertory Company at Her Majesty's Theatre in Barrow-in-Furness, for approximately two months, in June and July 1962.[11]

As well as an actor, Berkoff is a noted playwright and theatre director.[12] His earliest plays are adaptations of works by Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1969); In the Penal Colony (1969), and The Trial (1971). In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote a series of verse plays including East (1975), Greek (1980), and Decadence (1981), followed by West (1983) (later adapted and recorded at Limehouse Studios for transmission on Channel 4 in 1983), Harry's Christmas (Lunch) (also recorded at Limehouse Studios in 1983 but was never transmitted by C4 as it was considered "too dark"), Sink the Belgrano! (1986), Massage (1997), and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001). Berkoff described Sink the Belgrano! as "even by my modest standards ... one of the best things I have done".[13][14]

Drama critic Aleks Sierz describes Berkoff's dramatic style as "In-yer-face theatre":

The language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each other, 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.[15]

In 1988, Berkoff directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde, performed in slow motion, at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.[16] For his first directorial job at the UK's Royal National Theatre,[17] Berkoff revived the play with a new cast at the Lyttelton Auditorium; it opened in November 1989.[18] In 1998, his solo play Shakespeare's Villains premièred at London's Haymarket Theatre and was nominated for a Society of London Theatre Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment.[19]

In a 2010 interview with guest presenter Emily Maitlis on The Andrew Marr Show, Berkoff stated that he found it "flattering" to play evil characters, saying that the best actors assumed villainous roles.[20] In 2011, Berkoff revived a previously performed one-man show at the Hammersmith Riverside Studios, titled One Man. It consisted of two monologues; the first was an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, the second a piece called Dog, written by Berkoff, which was a comedy about a loud-mouthed football fan and his dog. In 2013, Berkoff performed his play An Actor's Lament at the Sinden Theatre in Tenterden, Kent; it is his first verse play since Decadence in 1981.[21] His 2018 one-act play Harvey deals with the story of Harvey Weinstein.[22]

Film

In film, Berkoff has played villains such as Soviet General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop (1984), the Soviet officer Colonel Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and gangster George Cornell in The Krays (1990). Berkoff has stated that he accepts roles in Hollywood only to subsidise his theatre work, and that he regards many of the films in which he has appeared as lacking artistic merit.[23]

In the Stanley Kubrick films A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975), Berkoff played a police officer, and a gambler aristocrat. His other films include the Hammer film Prehistoric Women (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), The Passenger (1975), Joseph Andrews (1977), McVicar (1980), Outland (1981), Coming Out of the Ice (1982), Underworld (1985), Revolution (1985), Absolute Beginners (1986), Prince's film Under the Cherry Moon (1986), Prisoner of Rio (1988), the Australian film Flynn (1993), Fair Game (1995), and Legionnaire (1998).

Berkoff was the main character voice in Expelling the Demon (1999), a short animation with music by Nick Cave. It received the award for Best Debut at the KROK International Animated Films Festival.[24] He has a cameo in the 2008 film The Cottage. Berkoff appeared in the 2010 British gangster film The Big I Am as "The MC", and in the same year, portrayed the antagonist in The Tourist. Berkoff portrayed Dirch Frode, attorney to Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Another 2011 credit is the independent film Moving Target. He also stars in Decline of an Empire (2014) playing the role of Liberius.

In 1994, he both appeared in and directed the film version of his verse play Decadence. Filmed in Luxembourg, it co-stars Joan Collins.

Television

In television, Berkoff had early roles in episodes of The Avengers and UFO episode "The Cat with Ten Lives" in 1970. Other TV credits include: Hagath, in the episode "Business as Usual" of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Stilgar, in the mini-series Children of Dune; gangster Mr. Wiltshire in one episode of Hotel Babylon; lawyer Freddie Eccles in "By the Pricking of My Thumbs", an episode of Agatha Christie's Marple; and Adolf Hitler in the mini-series War and Remembrance. In 1998, he made a guest appearance in the Canadian TV series La Femme Nikita (in the episode "In Between"). In 2006, he played celebrity/criminal Ray Cook in the New Tricks episode "Bank Robbery".

In 2010, Berkoff played former Granada Television chairman Sidney Bernstein for the BBC Four drama, The Road to Coronation Street. He has played the historical Florentine preacher Girolamo Savonarola in two separate TV productions: the 1990 TV film A Season of Giants and the 2011 series The Borgias. Berkoff appears 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". In September 2012, Berkoff appeared in the Doctor Who episode "The Power of Three".[25]

In 2014, Berkoff played a supporting role in the second season of the Lifetime TV show Witches of East End as King Nikolaus, the patriarch of the Beauchamp family.

In 2016, he appeared in series 3, episode 1 of the Channel 4 sitcom Man Down as Mr. Klackov, a "terrifying" caretaker with a Eastern European accent "who makes covering [series protagonist Dan's] mistakes even more complicated" when his job as a schoolteacher is threatened.[26][27]

Other work

In 1996, Berkoff appeared as the Master of Ceremonies in a BBC Radio 2 concert version of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. He provided the voice-over for the N-Trance single "The Mind of the Machine", which rose to No. 15 in the UK Singles Chart in August 1997. He appeared in the opening sequence to Sky Sports' coverage of the 2007 Heineken Cup Final, modelled on a speech by Al Pacino in the film Any Given Sunday (1999).

Berkoff voices the character General Lente, commander of the Helghan Third Army, in Killzone. He provides motion capture and voice performance for the PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword, as General Flying Fox.

Berkoff's 2015 novel Sod the Bitches has been described as "a kind of Philip Roth-like romp through the sex life of a libidinous actor". His 2014 memoir Bad Guy! Journal of a Hollywood Turkey records his time working on a Hollywood blockbuster.[22][28]

Berkoff appeared in the British Heart Foundation's two-minute public service advertisement, Watch Your Own Heart Attack, broadcast on ITV in August 2008.[29] He also presented two episodes of the BBC Two Horizon episodes: "To Infinity and Beyond..." (2010) and "The Power of the Placebo" (2014).

He is a patron of Brighton's Nightingale Theatre, a fringe theatre venue.[30]

Critical assessment

According to Annette Pankratz in her 2005 Modern Drama review of Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance by Robert Cross: "Steven Berkoff is one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain and – due to his self-fashioning as a bad boy of British theatre and the ensuing attention of the media – a phenomenon in his own right."[31] Pankratz further asserts that Cross "focuses on Berkoff's theatre of self-performance: that is, the intersections between Berkoff, the public phenomenon and Berkoff, the artist."[31]

Awards and honours

In 1991, Berkoff's play Kvetch won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Comedy. In 1997, Berkoff won the first Total Theatre Lifetime Achievement Award.[32] In 1998, he was nominated for a Society of London Theatre's Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment for his one-man show Shakespeare's Villains.[19] In 1999, the 25th-anniversary revival of the play East, directed by Berkoff, received the Stage Award for Best Ensemble work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In 2000, he won the LA Weekly Theater Award for Solo Performance, again for Shakespeare's Villains.[10][33] Also in 2000, his play Messiah, Scenes from a Crucifixion received a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.[34] In 2001, The Secret Love Life of Ophelia won a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel.[35]

The Berkoff Performing Arts Centre at Alton College, Hampshire, is named for Berkoff.[36] Attending the Alton College ceremony to honour 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 master-class later that day, and performed Shakespeare's Villains for an invited audience that evening.

Personal life

Berkoff lives with his partner, Clara Fisher, in Portsmouth.[1][10]

Defamation lawsuit

In 1996, Berkoff won Berkoff vs. Burchill, a libel civil action that 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."[37]

Political and religious views

Berkoff has spoken and written about how he believes Jews and Israel to be regarded in Britain. In a January 2009 interview with The Jewish Chronicle, in which he discussed anti-Israel sentiment in the aftermath of the Gaza War, he said:

There is an in-built dislike of Jews. Overt antisemitism goes against the British sense of fair play. It has to be covert and civilised. So certain playwrights and actors on the left wing make themselves out to be stricken with conscience. They say: 'We hate Israel, we hate Zionism, we don't hate Jews.' But Zionism is the very essence of what a Jew is. Zionism is the act of seeking sanctuary after years and years of unspeakable outrages against Jews. As soon as Israel does anything over the top it's always the same old faces who come out to demonstrate. I don't see hordes of people marching down the street against Mugabe when tens of thousands are dying every month in Zimbabwe.[38]

Interviewer Simon Round noted that Berkoff was also keen to express his view that right-wing Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, were "wretched".[38] Asked if British antisemitism manifested itself in theatre, Berkoff responded: "They quite like diversity and will tolerate you as long as you act a bit Gentile and don't throw your chicken soup around too much. You are perfectly entitled occasionally even to touch the great prophet of British culture, Shakespeare, as long as you keep your Jewishness well zipped up."[38] Berkoff also referred to the Gaza war as a factor in writing Biblical Tales: "It was the recent 'Gaza' war and the appalling flack that Israel received that prompted me to investigate ancient Jewish values."[39]

Speaking to The Jewish Chronicle in May 2010, Berkoff criticised the Bible but added, "it inspires the Jews to produce Samsons and heroes and to have pride". Berkoff went on to say of the Talmud in the same article: "As Jews, we are so incredibly lucky to have the Talmud, to have a way of re-interpreting the Torah. So we no longer cut off hands, and slay animals, and stone women."[40]

In a Daily Telegraph travel article written while visiting Israel in 2007, Berkoff described Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within, as "quite overwhelming in its research and common sense. It grips me throughout the journey."[41]

In 2012, Berkoff, with others, wrote in support of Israel's national theatre, Habima, performing in London.[42]

Filmography

Film

In the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy, struggling actor Dexter King (Jeff Goldblum) auditions unsuccessfully for an imaginary "Berkoff play" called England, My England. In the audition, characters dressed as skinheads swear repetitively at each other and a folding table is kicked over. Afterwards, Dexter's agent Mary (Anna Massey) muses, "I think he's probably mad ..."

"I'm scared of Steven Berkoff" is a line in the lyrics of the song "I'm Scared" by Queen guitarist Brian May, issued on his 1993 debut solo album Back to the Light.[45] May has declared himself to be an admirer of Berkoff[46] and his wife, Anita Dobson, has appeared in several of Berkoff's plays.

gollark: Which probably shows that it's a terrible idea to try and implement a caching thing for it which requires stringifying and unstringifying the output, but whatever.
gollark: Wow, this random pi calculation algorithm from the internet is so fast that stringifying and unstringifying the output is *slower* than calculating a million digits.
gollark: This is the nice thing about skynet; you don't even need to be on the same server.
gollark: Yes, good.
gollark: Oh, they *do* have closurey stuff, but python is ridiculous.

References
  1. "Steven Berkoff". Contemporary Writers. British Council. Archived from the original on 17 July 2009. Retrieved 30 September 2008.
  2. "Steven Berkoff". filmreference.com. Retrieved 30 September 2008.
  3. "Steven Berkoff". movies.yahoo.com (Yahoo! Inc.). Retrieved 30 September 2008.
  4. Else Kvist. ""Normally I'm the villain" says Steven Berkoff". Bromley Times. Archived from the original on 2 October 2012.
  5. Sorrel Kerbel (2003). Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century. Routledge. pp. 155–156. ISBN 1-57958-313-X.
  6. Alan Levy (24 July 2002). "Steven Berkoff: Caught in a web". The Prague Post. Archived from the original on 31 January 2013. Retrieved 16 April 2009.
  7. Room, Adrian (2010). Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins. McFarland. pp. 58.
  8. "Famous Personalities from Raine's Foundation School: Steven Berkoff (1948–1950)" (Press release). David A. Spencer (publicity officer), The Old Raineians' Association. Archived from the original on 11 October 2006. Retrieved 27 September 2008.
  9. Michael Coveney (4 January 2007). "Steven Berkoff: The Real East Enders". The Independent. UK. Retrieved 27 September 2008. In his latest play and in an exhibition of photographs, Steven Berkoff revisits his past in the vibrant melting-pot that was riverside London.
  10. "Steven Berkoff". Celebrities. hollywood.com. Archived from the original on 4 October 2008. Retrieved 30 September 2008.
  11. Peter Purves' autobiography "Here's One I Wrote Earlier ...", hardback edition, Green Umbrella Publishing, page 70. ISBN 978-1-906635-34-3.
  12. Akbar, Arifa (17 September 2010). "Steven Berkoff: Rise of an 'up and coming nobody'". The Independent. London.
  13. Steven Berkoff, "Free Association: An Autobiography", Faber and Faber, 1 July 1996, p.373. ISBN 978-0571176083
  14. "Steven Berkoff filmed - Iain Fisher". Steven Berkoff. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  15. Aleks Sierz (2001). In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 25–26. ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8.
  16. "Steven Berkoff directing". Retrieved 2 September 2012.
  17. "South Bank 1988–1996 – Stage by Stage – National Theatre" Archived 24 December 2012 at Archive.today. Retrieved 2 September 2012.
  18. "Past productions 1986–1990 – Past Events – National Theatre" Archived 24 December 2012 at Archive.today. Retrieved 2 September 2012.
  19. Society Of London Theatre
  20. "Evil roles are 'flattering'". BBC News. 1 August 2010.
  21. "Steven Berkoff's new play". Tenterden Forum. Archived from the original on 19 October 2013. Retrieved 30 January 2013.
  22. Steven Berkoff: who will dare to stage my one-man Harvey Weinstein play?. Guardian, 20 November 2018.
  23. "Steven Berkoff early films". iainfisher.com.
  24. Expelling the Demon on IMDb
  25. "tardistime.com". tardistime.com.
  26. "Steven Berkoff and Mark Hamill join Man Down Series 3". British Comedy Guide. 21 June 2016. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  27. "The Heist" on IMDb
  28. Steven Berkoff News at www.stevenberkoff.com
  29. Fiona Ramsay (4 August 2008). "ITV to Air British Heart Foundation's Two-minute 'heart attack' Ad". Media Week. BrandRepublic.com (Haymarket Group). Archived from the original on 14 August 2008. Retrieved 27 September 2008.
  30. "Nightingale Theatre: Patron Steven Berkoff". nightingaletheatre.co.uk/. Archived from the original on 25 September 2008. Retrieved 30 September 2008.
  31. Annette Pankratz (2005). "Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance, by Robert Cross". Modern Drama. 48 (2005): 459. doi:10.1353/mdr.2005.0035. Archived from the original on 6 August 2011.
  32. Total Theatre Award Past Winners. Retrieved 29 August 2012. Archived 19 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  33. Steven Leigh Morris, "The 21st Annual L.A. Weekly Theater Awards", L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2000. Retrieved 29 August 2012.
  34. "Berkoff's Messiah Tour Gets the Green Light", whatsonstage.com, 27 August 2001. Retrieved 29 August 2012.
  35. "2001 recipients | The Bank of Scotland Herald Angels" Archived 19 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 29 August 2012.
  36. "Front of Berkoff Performing Arts Centre". altoncollege.ac.uk.
  37. Mark Lunney and Ken Oliphant (2007). Tort Law: Text and Materials (3rd ed.). London and New York: Oxford University Press. p. 704. ISBN 978-0-19-921136-4.
  38. Simon Round, "Interview: Steven Berkoff", The Jewish Chronicle, 22 January 2009. Retrieved 2012-10-17.
  39. Steven Berkoff, "Press release for Biblical Tales", New End Theatre. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
  40. Jessica Elgot, "The Bible, rewritten by Steven Berkoff", The Jewish Chronicle, 21 May 2010. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
  41. Steven Berkoff, "A Tale of Tel Aviv", The Daily Telegraph, 10 June 2007. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
  42. Arnold Wesker, Ronald Harwood, Maureen Lipman, Simon Callow, Louise Mensch MP, Steven Berkoff, "Letters: We Welcome Israel's National Theatre", The Guardian, 10 April 2012. Retrieved 17 October 2012.
  43. Young, Deborah (13 June 2006). "Bokshu, The Myth". Variety. Retrieved 18 December 2017.
  44. Warrier, Shobha (22 May 2002). "Why can't an Indian make a film in English?". Rediff.com. Retrieved 18 December 2017.
  45. "Back to the Light". Amazon.com. Retrieved 1 October 2008.
  46. "BRIAN'S SOAPBOX". brianmay.com.

Sources
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.