1. Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington was born on 7 June 1943 and is an English actor, director and writer.
16 Facts About Michael Pennington
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Michael Pennington has written ten books, directed in the UK, US, Romania and Japan, and is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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Michael Pennington is best known for his role as Moff Jerjerrod in the original Star Wars trilogy film Return of the Jedi.
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Michael Pennington was educated at Marlborough College, became a member of the National Youth Theatre and then read English at Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Michael Pennington joined the Royal Shakespeare Company on graduation and remained in a junior capacity from 1964 to 1966, playing among other things Fortinbras in David Warner's 1965 Hamlet.
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Michael Pennington then left the company for eight years and worked in London, both on the stage, and on TV in many single dramas.
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Michael Pennington then left the company for a further eight years before appearing in Stephen Poliakoff's Playing with Trains, and ten years after that in the title role of Timon of Athens.
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Michael Pennington played Raskolnikov in Yuri Lyubimov's adaptation of Crime and Punishment, and Henry in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing in London's West End and played the title role in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex on BBC TV in 1985.
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Michael Pennington recorded the part of Euripides in Macedonia by David Rudkin for Radio 3, and in 2015 plans to take his solo show Anton Chekhov to Moscow.
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In 1983, Michael Pennington appeared as Moff Jerjerrod in the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi alongside fellow Old Vic alum James Earl Jones.
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Michael Pennington played Michael Foot in The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep; and among his notable TV appearances have been in the title role of Oedipus Rex and in the television movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
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Michael Pennington has played Holmes's nemesis, Professor Moriarty in two BBC Radio dramatizations of the Holmes short stories The Final Problem in 1992 and The Empty House in 1993.
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Michael Pennington has written three books about individual Shakespeare plays, Sweet William - Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare, as well as Let Me Play the Lion Too - How to Be an Actor for Faber and Faber.
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Michael Pennington's solo show Sweet William is available as a DVD.
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Michael Pennington has worked as a narrator on many TV documentaries.
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In 1964, Michael Pennington married actress Katharine Barker, with whom he had a son, Mark, before they divorced in 1967.