1. Steven Berkoff was born on Leslie Steven Berks; 3 August 1937 and is an English actor, author, playwright, theatre practitioner and theatre director.
34 Facts About Steven Berkoff
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Steven Berkoff's work has sometimes been viewed as an example of in-yer-face theatre, due to the intense presentation and taboo-breaking material in a number of his plays.
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Steven Berkoff comes from a Jewish family; his grandparents emigrated to England in the 1890s, his paternal grandparents from Romania, and his maternal grandparents from Russia.
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Steven later legally changed his surname to Berkoff and went by his middle name.
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However, Steven Berkoff's father struggled to find work, and after a few months the family returned to England.
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Steven Berkoff took drama courses at City Literary Institute, trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and later trained in physical theatre and mime at L'Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq, graduating in 1965.
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Steven Berkoff started his theatre training in the Repertory Company at His Majesty's Theatre in Barrow-in-Furness, for approximately two months, in June and July 1962.
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Steven Berkoff's earliest plays are adaptations of works by Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis ; In the Penal Colony, and The Trial.
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In 1988, Steven Berkoff directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde, performed in slow motion, at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
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In 2011, Steven Berkoff revived a previously performed one-man show at the Hammersmith Riverside Studios, titled One Man.
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In 2013, Steven 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.
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In film, Steven Berkoff has played villains such as Soviet General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy, the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, the Soviet officer Lieutenant Colonel Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II, and gangster George Cornell in The Krays.
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Steven 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.
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Steven Berkoff was the main character voice in Expelling the Demon, a short animation with music by Nick Cave.
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Steven Berkoff has a cameo in the 2008 film The Cottage.
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Steven 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.
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Steven Berkoff portrayed Dirch Frode, attorney to Henrik Vanger, in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
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In 2010, Steven Berkoff played former Granada Television chairman Sidney Bernstein for the BBC Four drama, The Road to Coronation Street.
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Steven Berkoff 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.
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Steven Berkoff appears as himself in the "Science" episode of the British current affairs satire Brass Eye, warning against the dangers of the fictional environmental disaster "Heavy Electricity".
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In September 2012, Steven Berkoff appeared in the Doctor Who episode "The Power of Three".
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In 2014, Steven 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.
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In 1996, Steven Berkoff appeared as the Master of Ceremonies in a BBC Radio 2 concert version of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret.
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Steven Berkoff 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.
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Steven Berkoff 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.
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Steven Berkoff provides motion capture and voice performance for the PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword, as General Flying Fox.
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Steven Berkoff appeared in the British Heart Foundation's two-minute public service advertisement, Watch Your Own Heart Attack, broadcast on ITV in August 2008.
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Steven Berkoff is a patron of Brighton's Nightingale Theatre, a fringe theatre venue.
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Steven Berkoff married Alison Minto in 1970, and Shelley Lee in 1976; both marriages ended in divorce.
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In 1996, Steven Berkoff won Steven 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".
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Steven Berkoff has spoken and written about how he believes Jews and Israel to be regarded in Britain.
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Interviewer Simon Round noted that Steven Berkoff was keen to express his view that right-wing Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, were "wretched".
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In 2015, Steven Berkoff expressed his view that white actors should be allowed to play the classic Shakespearean role of Othello, referring to any efforts to restrict the character's casting as "racism in reverse".
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The Steven Berkoff Performing Arts Centre at Alton College, Hampshire, is named for Steven Berkoff.