October 14, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Acclaimed British actor Derek Jacobi turns 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, October 14, Graphic News:  More than three decades have passed since Derek Jacobi limped onto our screens and stammered his way through one of the most memorable performances of any television costume drama. The BBC's ambitious serialisation, in 1976, of I, Claudius, based on two novels by Robert Graves, stunned audiences and critics alike and won Jacobi a BAFTA for Best Actor. The bright, East London schoolboy -- who, despite spending two years of his childhood bed-ridden with rheumatic fever, won a scholarship to Cambridge -- had been making a successful living as a stage actor for 15 years when the 12-part TV epic came his way. Among the long cast list of individuals he has portrayed since, Ellis Peters's monastic sleuth, Brother Cadfael, first transmitted by ITV in 1994, is another Jacobi made his own. The series, set in the 12th century border country between England and Wales, ran for four years and took the actor -- by then, Sir Derek -- on location to Hungary for much of the filming.
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"There's never been any game plan or thread to my career," he is on record as saying. "It's just happened that I've ricocheted from one interesting character to another."
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Rooted in the theatre, Jacobi had only been out of University three years and was in Repertory at Birmingham when, in 1963, no less a figure than Laurence Olivier spotted him and brought him into his newly-created National Theatre, in London. There, the history graduate, who had reassured his parents he would go into teaching if he failed to make it as an actor, played Laertes in Hamlet and then Cassio to Olivier's Othello in 1964, a production that was subsequently turned into a film. It was the stuff of dreams for the 25-year-old who, as a teenager, had watched the "greats" of British theatre -- John Gielgud, Richard Burton and Olivier among them -- on his frequent trips to the Old Vic from the family home in nearby Leytonstone.
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In a career now spanning almost 50 years, Jacobi has played many of the classical leads, touring the world with Hamlet in the late 1970s and joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982, where, in his first season, he gave a spell-binding performance as Prospero in The Tempest. His success at Stratford was a personal triumph, marking his return after a catastrophic attack of stage fright -- "absolute stark terror" is how he describes it -- which had kept him off the boards for two years.
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Jacobi's voice is regarded as one of the finest in the business. His narration of everything from the BBC children's series, In the Night Garden, to the audio book version of The Iliad, has brought him to the widest possible audience. His collaboration with Kenneth Branagh -- the two first worked together on Henry V -- has seen him in the role of director and he has even made a foray into American sitcom, sending up his craft in an appearance on Frasier. His depiction of the mathematician Alan Turing, in Breaking the Code, was a hit in London's West End before it, too, marked another TV milestone for the actor many regard as the best of his generation and a natural successor to his late mentor, Sir Laurence.
/ENDS