marlowe

Steven Berkoff: born 3 August 1937 is an English actor, author, playwright and theatre director. As an actor, he is best known for his performances in villainous roles, such as 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. Berkoff was born Leslie Steven Berks in Stepney in the East End of London on 3 August 1937, the son of Pauline, a housewife, and Alfred Berks, a tailor. His family was of Romanian-Jewish background. He attended Raine's Foundation Grammar School (1948–50), Hackney Downs School, the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art (1958) and L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (1965). Berkoff started his theatre training in the Repertory Company at Her Majesty's Theatre in Barrow-in-Furness, for approximately two months, in 1962. As well as an actor, Berkoff is a noted playwright and theatre director, with a unique style of writing and performance.[11] 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), 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". In 1988, Berkoff directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde, performed in slow motion, at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. For his first directorial job at the UK's Royal National Theatre, Berkoff revived the play with a new cast at the Lyttelton Auditorium; it opened in November 1989.[16] 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 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. 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 most recent play, An Actors Lament at the Sinden Theatre in Tenterden, Kent; it is his first verse play since Decadence in 1981. In film, Berkoff has played villains such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, gangster George Cornell in The Krays, the Soviet officer Colonel Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II, and General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy. 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe