You Season 1 : 2018 - 2018 - S01 - E3

Oliver Robert Ford Davies OBE (born 12 August 1939) is an English actor, theatre historian, director, playwright, and writer. He is best known for his extensive theatre work, and to a broader audience for his role as Sio Bibble in Star Wars Episodes I to III. He is also known for his role as Maester Cressen in HBO series Game of Thrones.

Oliver Robert Ford Davies[1][a] was born in Ealing, Middlesex, England on 12 August 1939.[3] His father was a teacher.[4]

Aged 11, he performed in a school play, Richard of Bordeaux, and found that he "liked being someone else".[4] In 1956 he joined the eminent Ealing amateur company Questors.[5] He won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he read history and became president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. After obtaining his DPhil,[6] he did a postgraduate teaching qualification.[4]

From 1964,[4] Davies worked as a history lecturer at the University of Edinburgh before taking up acting professionally in 1967,[4] "to give acting a go". Among his students was future foreign secretary of the UK Robin Cook.[7]

In 1959, as a member of the Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club, Davies appeared in his first Stratford performance in the Memorial Theatre's open-air production of Bartholomew Fair.[8][9]

His first professional appearances were, at the age of 27, in the 1967 season at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre – which at that time included Michael Gambon, Brian Cox, Timothy Dalton, and Anna Calder-Marshall.[4] Short Seasons at the Mermaid, London, the Oxford Playhouse and the Cambridge Arts Theatre followed.[10] Davies' long and prolific association with the Royal Shakespeare Company started in 1975, when director Terry Hands cast him as Mountjoy in Henry V.[11][12] His breakthrough in theatre came in 1990, when he was given the lead role in Sir David Hare's Racing Demon at the Royal National Theatre in London.[4]

In 2002, Davies played King Lear in an Almeida Theatre production. The following year, he played opposite Joan Plowright in Absolutely! (perhaps), an adaptation of Pirandello's Cosi e (se vi pare) by Martin Sherman. Franco Zeffirelli directed the play for Wyndham's Theatre and the Theatre Royal Haymarket.[7][2]

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