Steven Berkoff

"Berkoff" redirects here. For other people, see Berkoff (surname).

Steven Berkoff
Born	Leslie Steven Berks (1937-08-03) 3 August 1937 Stepney, London, England
Occupation(s)	Actor, director, writer
Years active	1959–present
Spouse(s)	Shelley Lee (August 1976; divorced)
Partner	Clara Fisher
Website	http://www.stevenberkoff.com

Steven Berkoff (born 3 August 1937) is an English actor, playwright, author and director, 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 epic mini-series War and Remembrance.

Early life

Berkoff was born Leslie Steven Berks in Stepney in the East End of London on 3 August 1937, the son of Pauline (Hyman), a housewife and Alfred Berks (Berkovitch), a tailor. His family was of Russian-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).

Career

Theatre

He joined the Repertory Company at Her Majesty's Theatre in Barrow-in-Furness for approximately two months in 1962.

As well as being an actor, Berkoff is a noted playwright and director, with a unique style of writing and performance.

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) as well as West (1983); Sink the Belgrano! (1986); Massage (1997); Sturm und Drang and The Secret Love Life of Ophelia (2001).

Critic Ned Chaillett has described Sink the Belgrano!, a critical take on the Falklands War which premièred at the Half Moon Theatre in Stepney on 2 September 1986, as "a diatribe in punk-Shakespearean verse" and Berkoff himself described it as "even by my modest standards ... one of the best things I have done".

Berkoff employs a style of heightened physical theatre known as "total theatre". Drama critic Aleks Sierz describes Berkoff's dramatic style as "In-yer-face theatre":

The language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent. At its best, this kind of theatre is so powerful, so visceral, that it forces audiences to react: either they feel like fleeing the building or they are suddenly convinced that it is the best thing they have ever seen and want all their friends to see it too. It is the kind of theatre that inspires us to use superlatives, whether in praise or condemnation."

In 1988, he directed an interpretation of Salome by Oscar Wilde, performed in slow motion, at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. In his first directorial job at the UK's National Theatre, Berkoff then revived the play with a new cast at the Lyttelton auditorium, opening on 7 November 1989.

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 an August 2010 interview with guest presenter Emily Maitlis on The Andrew Marr Show, he said he found it 'flattering' playing evil characters, saying that the best actors took on the roles of villains.

In 2011, Berkoff revived a previously performed one-man show at the Hammersmith Riverside Studios called One Man. It consisted of two monologues; the first was an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart and the second was a piece written by Berkoff called Dog, which was a comedy about a loud-mouthed football fan and his dog.

In 2013, Berkoff performed his latest play An Actors Lament, his first verse-play since Decadence in 1981, at the Sinden Theatre in Tenterden, Kent.

Film and Television

In Hollywood films, Steven Berkoff has played villains such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop; gangster George Cornell in The Krays; the sadistic Soviet officer Col. Podovsky in Rambo: First Blood Part II and General Orlov in the James Bond film Octopussy. Berkoff has stated that he takes Hollywood roles only in order to subsidise his theatre work. He regards many of the films he has appeared in as lacking artistic merit.

He also appeared in the 1967 Hammer film Prehistoric Women, in the 1980 film McVicar alongside Roger Daltrey and in the 1996 Australian biographical film on the early life of Errol Flynn entitled Flynn (entitled My Forgotten Man in some markets).

In Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975), Berkoff plays a police officer and a gambler nobleman (Lord Ludd), respectively.

In 1994, he starred in and directed the film version of his own verse-play Decadence. Shot in Luxembourg, it co-starred Joan Collins.

In 1998, he made a guest appearance in La Femme Nikita (episode "In Between").

He was the main character voice on Expelling The Demon (1999), a short animation by Devlin Crow, written by A-Soma with music by Nick Cave. It won Best Film at the Ukraine Film Festival.

With Andy Serkis and others, he appears briefly in a cameo in the 2008 film The Cottage.

He appeared in the 2010 British gangster film The Big I Am playing "The MC" and the same year played the role of antagonist in The Tourist with Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and Paul Bettany.

In 2010, he played the former Granada Television chairman Sidney Bernstein in the BBC Four drama, The Road to Coronation Street.

Berkoff portrayed Dirch Frode, attorney to Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, opposite Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig and also appeared in the 2011 independent feature Moving Target.

On television, he had an early role in an episode of The Avengers. He also had an early role as a regular playing a Moonbase Interceptor pilot in the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO. His other television roles include: Hagath in the episode "Business as Usual" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Stilgar in the 2003 miniseries Children of Dune; a gangster (Mr Wiltshire) in episode 8 of the BBC's Hotel Babylon series; a lawyer (Freddie Eccles) in an episode of ITV's Marple entitled By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Adolf Hitler in the mini-series War and Remembrance, a role he originally baulked at taking, primarily on moral grounds, he later relented.

Berkoff played the historical Florentine preacher Girolamo Savonarola on two separate television series. The first time was in 1991 for the television film A Season of Giants. He would again play the role of Savonarola on the 2011 series The Borgias.

Berkoff also appears as himself in the "Science" episode of the British current affairs satire Brass Eye (1997), warning against the dangers of the fictional environmental disaster "Heavy Electricity".

Berkoff appeared in the Doctor Who episode "The Power of Three", which aired on 22 September 2012.

Other work

Berkoff voices the character General Lente, commander of the Helghan Third Army, in the first game of the PlayStation based Killzone series.

In 1996, he appeared as the Master of Ceremonies in a BBC Radio 2 concert version of Kander & Ebb's Cabaret.

Berkoff speaks the voiceover in "The Mind of the Machine" single by the UK dance-music band N-Trance which reached No. 15 in the UK Singles Chart in August 1997. He also appeared in the opening sequence to Sky Sports' coverage of the 2007 Heineken Cup Final, modelled on a speech by Al Pacino in the 1999 film Any Given Sunday.

With Andy Serkis and others, he provides motion capture and voice for the PlayStation 3 game Heavenly Sword, playing one of its main villains, General Flying Fox.

He appears in the British Heart Foundation's two-minute public service advertisement, Watch Your Own Heart Attack, broadcast on ITV, on 10 August 2008. In 2010, he also presented the BBC Horizon episode, "Infinity and Beyond".

He is also patron of the Nightingale Theatre, in Brighton, a fringe theatre venue.

Awards, nominations and other honours

In 1991, Berkoff's play Kvetch won the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for Best Comedy. In 1997, Berkoff won the first Total Theatre Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999, the 25th anniversary revival of East, which he directed, won the Stage Award for Best Ensemble work at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for that year. In 1998 he was nominated for a Society Of London Theatre Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment for his one-man show Shakespeare's Villains and in 2000, he won the LA Weekly Theater Award for Solo Performance for the same show. Also in 2000, his play Messiah, Scenes from a Crucifixion won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2001, his play The Secret Love Life of Ophelia received a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel.

The Berkoff Performing Arts Centre was named for him at Alton College, in North East Hampshire on 20 June 2008.

Attending the Alton College ceremony honouring him, he stated:

I remember in my younger days questioning what life means. Finding a place like the Berkoff Performing Arts Centre, I found myself as a person. Having a place like this sowed the seeds of the man I think I am today. A place like this is the first step in changing the life of a person. There's something about theatre that draws people together because it's something connected with the human soul. All over the UK, the performing arts links people with a shared humanity as a way to open the doors to the mysteries of life. We should never underestimate the power of the theatre. It educates, informs, enlightens and humanises us all.

He taught a drama master-class later that day and performed his one-man show Shakespeare's Villains for an invited audience of 100 that evening.

Critical assessment

According to Annette Pankratz, in her 2005 Modern Drama review of Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance by Robert Cross:

Steven Berkoff is one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain and – due to his self-fashioning as a bad boy of British theatre and the ensuing attention of the media – a phenomenon in his own right.

Pankratz further asserts that Cross:

focuses on Berkoff's theatre of self-performance, that is, the intersections between Berkoff, the public phenomenon and Berkoff, the artist.

Allusions in popular culture

In the 1989 romantic comedy The Tall Guy, struggling actor Dexter King (Jeff Goldblum) auditions unsuccessfully for an imaginary 'Berkoff play' called England, My England. In the audition, characters dressed as skinheads swear repetitively at each other and a folding table is kicked over. Afterwards, Dexter's agent Mary (Anna Massey) muses: "I think he's probably mad..."

"I'm scared of Steven Berkoff" is a line in the lyrics of "I'm Scared" by Queen's guitarist Brian May, on his 1993 first solo album Back to the Light. Brian May has declared himself to be great admirer of Berkoff and his wife, Anita Dobson, has appeared in several of Berkoffs plays.

Legal controversy

In 1996, Berkoff prevailed as the plaintiff in Berkoff v. Burchill, a libel civil action which he brought against Sunday Times journalist Julie Burchill, after she published comments suggesting that he was "hideously ugly"; the judge ruled for Berkoff, finding that Burchill's actions "held him to ridicule and contempt."

Personal life

Berkoff has spoken and written about how he believes Jews and Israel are perceived and treated in Britain. In a January 2009 interview with The Jewish Chronicle, discussing anti-Israel sentiment following the Gaza War, he said, "There is an inbuilt dislike of Jews. Overt antisemitism goes against the British sense of fair play. It has to be covert and civilised. So certain playwrights and actors on the left wing make themselves out to be stricken with conscience. They say: 'We hate Israel, we hate Zionism, we don't hate Jews.' But Zionism is the very essence of what a Jew is. Zionism is the act of seeking sanctuary after years and years of unspeakable outrages against Jews. As soon as Israel does anything over the top it's always the same old faces who come out to demonstrate. I don't see hordes of people marching down the street against Mugabe when tens of thousands are dying every month in Zimbabwe." Interviewer Simon Round found Berkoff keen to add that right-wing Israeli politicians, like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, were "wretched". Asked if British antisemitism manifested itself in the theatrical establishment, Berkoff responded: "They quite like diversity and will tolerate you as long as you act a bit gentile and don’t throw your chicken soup around too much. You are perfectly entitled occasionally even to touch the great prophet of British culture, Shakespeare, as long as you keep your Jewishness well zipped up." Berkoff also referred to the Gaza war as a factor in writing Biblical Tales: "It was the recent 'Gaza' war and the appalling flack that Israel received that prompted me to investigate ancient Jewish values."

Speaking to The Jewish Chronicle (10 May 2010) Berkoff expressed blunt and severely critical views of the Bible, but said he believed "it inspires the Jews to produce Samsons and heroes and to have pride". Berkoff went on to say of the Talmud in the same article, that "as Jews, we are so incredibly lucky to have the Talmud, to have a way of reinterpreting the Torah. So we no longer cut off hands, and slay animals, and stone women."

In a Telegraph travel article he wrote on a two-day visit Israel in 2007, Berkoff described Melanie Phillips' book Londonistan, as "quite overwhelming in its research and common sense. It grips me throughout the journey."

In 2012, Berkoff, with others, wrote in support of Israel's national theatre, Habima, performing in London.

He lives with his companion, Clara Fisher, in east London.

References

• Billington, Michael. "Happy Birthday, Steven Berkoff". The Guardian Theatre Blog. 3 August 2007. ("The hard man with a sensitive soul is 70 today. I've always admired him as an actor, director and – above all – phenomenon.")
• Cross, Robert. Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7190-6254-3 (10). ISBN 978-0-7190-6254-4 (13). (Rev. by Pankratz.) (Synopis at Google Books, with hyperlinked table of contents and limited preview.)
• Pankratz, Annette. Rev. of Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance. Modern Drama 48 (2005): 459–61. (Extract; Project Muse subscription required for online access to full text.)
• Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. ISBN 0-571-20049-4 (10). ISBN 978-0-571-20049-8 (13).
• "Steven Berkoff". Contemporary Writers. British Council. Retrieved 30 Sep 2008.

External links

• Official website
• Steven Berkoff at IMDb
• Steven Berkoff in The Playwrights Database at Doolee.com, with helpful description about many of Berkoff's plays, and details of unperformed plays.
• Steven Berkoff at Memory Alpha
• Comprehensive Steven Berkoff website by Iain Fisher