BOB (ROBERT) PECK. Born in Leeds, England, 23 August 1945. Educated at Leeds College of Art, diploma in Art and Design, 1967. Married: Gillian Mary Baker, 1982, children: Hannah Louise and George Edward. Member of repertory theaters in Birmingham, Scarborough, and Exeter, 1969-74; Royal Shakespeare Company, 1975-84; appeared in numerous television programs and films, since 1974. Recipient: Broadcasting Press Guild Award; BAFTA Award.

TELEVISION

1974 Sunset Across the Bay
1983 Nicholas Nickleby
1985 Edge of Darkness
1987 After Pilkington
1989 One Way Out
1990 Centre Point
1990 Screen Two "Children Crossing"
1991 The War That Never Ends
1992 Centrepoint
1992 Children of the Dragon
1992 Natural Lies
1992 The Black Velvet Gown
1996 Merchant of Venice

FILMS

Parker, 1985; On the Black Hill, 1987; The Kitchen Toto, 1987; Slipstream, 1989; Ladder of Swords, 1989; Lord of the Flies, 1990; Hard Times, 1991; Jurassic Park, 1993.

STAGE

Life Class, 1974; Henry IV, Parts One and Two, 1975-76; King Lear, 1976; Winter's Tale, 1976; Man is Man, 1976; Destiny, 1976-77; Schweyk in the Second World War, 1976-77; Much Ado About Nothing, 1977; Macbeth, 1976-78, 1983; Bandits, 1977; The Bundle, 1977; The Days of the Commune, 1977; The Way of the World, 1978; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1978; Cymbeline, 1979; Othello, 1979; The Three Sisters, 1979; The Accrington Pals, 1981; The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, 1981; Anthony and Cleopatra, 1983; The Tempest, 1983; Maydays, 1983; A Chorus of Disapproval, 1985; The Road to Mecca, 1985; In Lambeth, 1989; The Price, 1990.

 

 

   

The British actor Bob Peck shot to television stardom in 1986 in the acclaimed BBC drama serial, Edge of Darkness. His performance as the dour Yorkshire policeman Ronald Craven, inexorably drawn by his daughter's sudden and violent death into a passionate quest for the truth behind a series of incidents in a nuclear processing facility, won him best actor awards from the Broadcasting Press Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television, as well as establishing an image of brooding diffidence which was to set the seal on a number of subsequent roles. His aquiline, yet disconcertingly ordinary, countenance was to become familiar to television audiences even if the name did not always spring to mind. He has also been much in demand for voice-overs in commercials and documentaries, to which his distinctive bass tones have lent a potent mixture of assurance and mystery, as well as an association with the integrity of purpose that characterised his performance as Craven. Success in Edge of Darkness also brought him film roles, notably in the British productions The Kitchen Toto and On the Black Hill in 1987, then, most famously, as the doomed game warden Muldoon in Jurassic Park(1993).

Peck received no formal training but studied art and design at Leeds College of Art, where, in an amateur dramatic company, he was spotted by the writer/director Alan Ayckbourn, who recruited him to his new theatre company in Scarborough. After stints in the West End and regional repertory, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he stayed for nine years, playing a wide range of parts in classical and contemporary work. One of his final appearances for the company was in the double role of John Browdie and Sir Mulberry Hawke in the epic dramatisation of Nicholas Nickleby, subsequently televised on Channel 4. Along with Anthony Sher, Bernard Hill and Richard Griffiths, Peck was one of a number of established stage actors in the early 1980s to be brought into television for roles in major new drama serials by BBC producer Michael Wearing.

Peck's performance in Edge of Darkness embodies the paradox that is at the heart of the drama. Just as the labyrinthine plot remorselessly exposes the apocalyptic vision behind a veneer of English restraint, so Craven is depicted as a detached loner, whose mundane ordinariness hides long repressed emotions and whose enigmatic composure explodes into bursts of grief, passion and--in the closing moments--primal anguish. In this sense, it is also a performance which, like other work of this period (such as Bernard Hill's Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff), brings to the surface the expressionistic subcurrents of a new wave of British television drama realism. Peck was cast partly because an unknown actor was wanted for the role and because it was written for a Yorkshireman, yet there are mystic and mythic elements in the quest conducted by this seemingly ordinary character that ultimately assume epic proportions. The plot calls for long sequences of physical activity and energy, but Peck's real achievement is a granite-like impassivity which just manages to hold back the pain and possible madness behind the character's stoic endurance. This tension is cleverly offset by the puckish outlandishness of Joe Don Baker's performance as the CIA agent Jedburgh.

Some of Peck's later television casting seemed to cash in on the Edge of Darkness connection. The figure of Craven was partly reprised in the serial Natural Lies (BBC, 1992), where he is an advertising executive, Andrew Fell, accidentally stumbling across a conspiracy to cover up a BSE-like scare in the British food industry; and in Centrepoint (Channel 4, 1992), another dystopian drama, he plays Armstrong, a surveillance expert, this time with far right state security connections. In a serialisation of the Catherine Cookson's The Black Velvet Gown (Tyne Tees, 1993), he brought his brooding presence to the role of the reclusive former teacher, Percival Miller.

Peck's range, however, is wider than the image of the tormented hard man might suggest. Perhaps his most highly acclaimed performance after Edge of Darkness was as the mild mannered, accident-prone academic, James Westgate, who falls victim to his childhood sweetheart's psychopathic desires, in Simon Gray's Prix Italia winning television play, After Pilkington (BBC, 1987). Like many actors of his generation, he has also been able to bring his stage experience to bear on a variety of classical roles, from Gradgrind in the BBC serialisation of Hard Times (1994) and Shylock in a Channel 4 production of The Merchant of Venice (1996), to Nicias in The War That Never Ends (BBC 1991)--a drama-documentary account of the Peloponnesian Wars written by ex-RSC director John Barton---and Dante in Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips' A TV Dante: The Inferno Cantos I-VIII (Channel 4, 1989).

-Jeremy Ridgman