Ciarán Hinds

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Ciarán Hinds
Ciarán Hinds, 2008
Born	9 February 1953 (1953-02-09) (age 56) Belfast, Northern Ireland
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1976–present
Domestic partner(s)	Hélène Patarot (1987-present)

Ciarán Hinds (English pronunciation: /ˈkɪərən ˈhaɪndz/ KEER-uhn; born 9 February 1953) is an IFTA award-winning Irish actor.^[1][2]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Personal 4 Partial filmography 4.1 Film 4.2 Television 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Early life

Hinds was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Raised a Catholic in North Belfast, he was one of five children and the only son of his doctor father and schoolteacher mother. His mother, Moya, was also an amateur actress. He was an Irish dancer in his youth and was educated at Holy Family Primary School and St. Malachy's College. After leaving St. Malachy's, he enrolled as a law student at Queen's University but was soon persuaded to pursue acting and abandoned his studies at Queen's to enroll at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

[edit] Career

Hinds began his professional acting career at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre in a 1976 production of Cinderella. He remained a frequent performer at the Citizens' Theatre during the late 1970s and through the mid-1980s. During this same period, Hinds also performed on stage in Ireland with the Abbey Theatre, the Field Day Theatre Company, the Druid Theatre, the Lyric Players' Theatre and at the Project Arts Centre. In 1987, he was cast by Peter Brook in The Mahabharata, a six hour theatre piece that toured the world, and he also featured in its 1989 film version. In the early 1990s, he was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A notable RSC performance came in the title role of the 1993 production of Richard III directed by Sam Mendes; Mendes turned to Hinds as a last minute replacement for an injured Simon Russell Beale. Hinds gained his most popular recognition as a stage actor for his performance as Larry in the London and Broadway productions of Patrick Marber's Tony Award-nominated play Closer. In 1999, Hinds was awarded both the Theatre World Award for Best Debut in NYC and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Special Achievement (Best Ensemble Cast Performance) for his work in Closer. He was on stage in 2001 in The Yalta Game by Brian Friel at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He appeared in the Broadway production of The Seafarer by Conor McPherson, which ran at the Booth theater from December 2007 through March 2008. In February 2009 Hinds took the leading role of "General Sergei Kotov" in Burnt by the Sun by Peter Flannery at London's National Theatre.^[8] Hinds returned to the stage later in 2009 with a role in Conor McPherson's play The Birds, which opened at Dublin's Gate Theatre in September 2009.

Hinds made his feature film debut in John Boorman's Excalibur (1981). His portfolio of film portrayals also includes Captain Frederick Wentworth in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1995), Jonathan Reiss in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), John Traynor in Veronica Guerin (2003), and Firmin in the film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera (2004). Hinds also played Carl, a cover-up professional assisting a group of assassins, in Steven Spielberg's political thriller, Munich (2005). In 2006, he appeared in Michael Mann's film adaptation of the 80's television show, Miami Vice, and as Herod the Great in The Nativity Story.^[9] In the 2007 film Amazing Grace, Hinds portrays Sir Banastre Tarleton, one the chief opponents of abolition of the slave trade in parliament. He stars in Margot at the Wedding, alongside Nicole Kidman, Jack Black and Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a drama-comedy about family secrets and relationships. He also appears in There Will Be Blood (2007) directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

On television, Hinds portrayed Gaius Julius Caesar in the first season of BBC/HBO's series, Rome (2006). He has also been featured in a number of made-for-television movies, including the role of Michael Henchard in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (2004), for which he received the Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series. Additional television performances include Edward Parker-Jones in the crime drama series Prime Suspect 3 (1993), Abel Mason in the late Dame Catherine Cookson's The Man Who Cried (1993), Jim Browner in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes episode The Cardboard Box (1994), Fyodor Glazunov in the science fiction miniseries Cold Lazarus (1996), Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1997), the Knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1997) and a portrayal of the French existentialist Albert Camus in Broken Morning (2003). Hinds has also featured in two notable television docudramas: Granada Television's 1990 docudrama Who Bombed Birmingham? in which Hinds portrayed Richard McIlkenny, a Belfastman falsely imprisoned for an IRA bombing; and HBO's 1993 docudrama Hostages, where he portrayed Irish writer and former hostage Brian Keenan. Hinds stars opposite Kelly Reilly in Above Suspicion, a TV adaptation of Lynda La Plante's detective story, which aired in the United Kingdom in January 2009 and will come back in 2010 as DCI Langton in Lynda La Plante's The Red Dahlia.

Hinds' dramatic abilities have been put to use in audiobook and radio productions as well. He performed as Valmont in the BBC Radio production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Hinds also narrated the Penguin Audiobook Ivanhoe. He also performed in Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale as part of The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare, an audio production of William Shakespeare's plays which won the 2004 Audie Award for "Best Audio Drama." Another notable audio performance is his reading of the short story A Painful Case for the Caedmon audio of James Joyce's Dubliners.

Ciarán Hinds is set to play the role of Albus Dumbledore's brother Aberforth (replacing Jim McManus, who played him in a cameo in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) in the last Harry Potter films

[edit] Personal

Hinds lives in Paris with his long-time partner, Hélène Patarot; they met in 1987 while in the cast of Peter Brook's production of The Mahabharata. They have a daughter, Aoife, born in 1991.^[10]

Hinds is close friends with Liam Neeson and served as a pallbearer at the funeral of Neeson's wife, Natasha Richardson, in upstate New York on March 22, 2009.^[11]

[edit] Partial filmography

[edit] Film

• Excalibur (1981)
• The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
• December Bride (1991)
• Circle of Friends (1995)
• Mary Reilly (1996)
• Some Mother's Son (1996)
• The Life of Stuff (1997)
• Oscar and Lucinda (1997)
• Titanic Town (1998)
• The Lost Son (1999)
• The Weight of Water (2000)
• The Sum of All Fears (2002)
• Road to Perdition (2002)
• Veronica Guerin (2003)
• Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003)
• Calendar Girls (2003)
• The Statement (2003)
• Mickybo and Me (2004)
• The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
• Munich (2005)
• Miami Vice (2006)
• Amazing Grace (2006)
• The Tiger's Tail (2006)
• The Nativity Story (2006)
• Hallam Foe (2007)
• Margot at the Wedding (2007)
• There Will Be Blood (2007)
• In Bruges (2008)
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
• Stop-Loss (2008)
• Ca$h (2008)
• The Tale of Despereaux (2008) (voice)
• Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
• The Eclipse (2009)
• Life During Wartime (2009)
• The Debt (2010)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (2011)

[edit] Television

• Our Boys (1981)
• The Mahabharata (1989)
• Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990)
• Between the Lines, episode: Private Enterprise (1992)
• Hostages (1993)
• The Man Who Cried (1993)
• Prime Suspect 3 (1993)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, episode: The Cardboard Box (1994)
• A Dark-Adapted Eye (1994)
• Rules of Engagement (1995)
• Persuasion (1995)
• Cold Lazarus (1996)
• Jane Eyre (1997)
• Ivanhoe (1997)
• The Mayor of Casterbridge (2004)
• Rome (2005-07)
• Above Suspicion (2009)
• The Red Dahlia (2010)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Ciarán Hinds at the Internet Movie Database