Playwright, actor, and director, born in London, UK. After studying at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, he founded the London Theatre Group, for whom he directed his own adaptations from the classics, including Kafka's Metamorphosis (1969). His own plays include Greek (1979, a variant of the Oedipal myth transferred to contemporary London), Decadence (1982),West (1983, an adaptation of the Beowulf legend), Kvetch (1987), and Acapulco (1992). Other plays and adaptations include Agamemnon (1963), The Trial (1970), The Fall of the House of Usher (1974), and The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (1999). His publications include Graft: Tales of an Actor (1998) and Richard II in New York (1999). In 1998 he wrote, directed, and acted in Shakespeare's Villains, a one-man show. An autobiography, Free Association, appeared in 1996.
Steven Berkoff (born August 3, 1937) is an English actor, writer and director.
As a screen actor, he is best known for villainous roles such as the corrupt art dealer Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop, a gangster in The Krays, the sadistic Soviet officer Col. He was also a police officer in A Clockwork Orange, a gambler nobleman (Lord Ludd) in Barry Lyndon, a gangster called Mr Wiltshire in episode 8 of BBC 1's "Hotel Babylon" series and a lawyer called Freddie Eccles in an episode of ITV's Miss Marple entitled By the Pricking of My Thumbs.
Berkoff is also a respected and prominent stage writer, actor and director. In the late 1980s he directed an acclaimed interpretation of Salome (play) by Oscar Wilde in the Gate Theatre, Dublin and, later, the UK.
He trained in mime and physical theatre alongside Jacques Lecoq in Paris and also at Webber Douglas in London. He is renowned for his unique style of heightened physical theatre which has been coined total theatre.
His most prominent influences are Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud and of course Jacques Lecoq.
He is currently patron at the Nightingale Theatre, home of the Trestle Theatre company, in Brighton.
Further reading
Robert Cross, Steven Berkoff and the Theatre of Self-Performance (Manchester University Press, 2004)
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