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Roy Dotrice

Roy Dotrice, the popular London-born actor, plays Leopold Mozart in Amadeus, the stage father of the great composer who gave up his own musical career to devote himself to the education and the often-hapless fortunes of his genius son.

Mr. Dotrice's first major acting role was Mio in Maxwell Anderson's historic Winterset in 1942, when he was sixteen. After 3½ years in a POW camp, he acted in or directed 500 repertory productions in London. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company for eight years, assuming leading roles in Stratford and London. Dotrice introduced baseball to the Royal Shakespeare, long a cricket stronghold, and shared the baseball diamond with Paul Robeson, Laurence Olivier, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney—with Charles Laughton as the umpire. He recalls the gab during and between games was highly creative and frequently profane.

From 1968 he appeared in 20 productions in London's West End, in numerous television shows and over a dozen films. He won an Emmy Award as the tramp in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.

Dotrice's first Broadway productions were one-man shows. With 1,700 performances, his Brief Lives made the Guiness Book of Records as the longest-running one-man show on Broadway. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his role in A Life.

He was a leading member of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, where he played Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I and Polonius in Hamlet. In that same year he played Winston Churchill at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. His other roles included Abraham Lincoln, Will Rogers and Charles Dickens in one-man shows, plus Moon for the Misbegotten. Film and television appearances have included The Scarlet Letter, Picket Fences, The Colour of Funny and Madigan Men."


Note: This profile was written in or before 2002.

Roy Dotrice Facts

OccupationActor
BirthdayMay 26, 1923 (100)
SignGemini
BirthplaceLondon, England, United Kingdom

Selected Filmography

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Camp Hollywood
Amadeus
The Prince and the Pauper
Beauty and the Beast: The Complete Series
Amadeus: Director's Cut
The Cutting Edge
The Fall of Night
Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers
Saturn 3
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