Acting

- twenty years of pretending to be someone else for a living

As Jon Glentoran, I was an actor for twenty years. Acting, at least in theatre, is an ephemeral thing; once the play closes there is nothing left of the performance but a few photos and yellowing newspaper cuttings. So here, with my acting career safely behind me (for now), and at the risk of accusations of typical actor's vanity, is a record of those twenty years and all the people I briefly became beneath the stage-lights...

As the profession goes I was relatively successful, working mostly in regional theatre although I made odd appearances on TV (I was a regular character on BBC TV's hospital soap 'Angels' for a year as Dr.Edward Clarke). And there were a couple of ads along the way, one of which - the goalkeeping German sentry in the Carling Black Label 'Dambusters' advert - brought me more recognition in three minutes than anything else I'd done!

I was a typical actor of the kind that very rarely gets heard about - the media tending to concentrate, for obvious and justifiable reasons, on the small minority of performers who 'make it' and become worthy of the coverage! Most actors, however, live like I did for twenty years - working regularly but anonymously in regional productions all over the country, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Between 1978 and 1998 I appeared in more than eighty plays, from Shakespeare to Berkoff, Coward to Webster...

This section of the site is an attempt to chronicle this time - twenty years as a working actor, probably of interest to very few people, but a small try at redressing the balance of coverage in favour of the unsung performers who, underpaid and under-appreciated, were trying to keep theatre alive during those two decades.

I've divided the section into four parts:

Pre 1978 - school plays, early non-professional work, and three years of shows at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school...
1978 to 1988 - from TIE to Tents...
1988 to 1998 - peaks and troughs...
TV and other work - my Warholian 15 minutes...

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air..."