Alan Williams

Alan Williams is a British actor and playwright whose career has stretched across more than four decades, two continents, and the full breadth of stage, screen, and television. Born in 1954 in Manchester, England, he belongs to a generation of working-class northern performers who came up through the regional theatre boom of the 1970s and went on to populate the character roles that give British drama much of its texture. He is rarely a leading name on a poster, but he has been one of those reliable, weather-beaten presences whose face viewers recognise without quite being able to place, and whose performances tend to be remembered by directors long after the project has wrapped.

Williams was educated at The Manchester Grammar School, an academic institution rather than a stage school, and he came to acting somewhat obliquely. He took some classes in formal theatre schooling, but the bulk of his training came as an apprentice at the Hull Truck Theatre, the touring company founded by Mike Bradwell and later led by playwright John Godber. Hull Truck in the late 1970s was famously a writer-and-actor's workshop, building shows from devised improvisation rather than established texts, and that grounding shaped Williams as much as a writer as a performer. He emerged from it with the kind of voice, observational and dry, that lends itself to character work and to playwriting in roughly equal measure.

His breakthrough as a writer-performer came with what he called the Cockroach trilogy, three one-man plays comprising The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati, The Return of the Cockroach and The Cockroach Has Landed. Williams performed the trilogy at The Bush Theatre, the influential London fringe venue above a Shepherd's Bush pub that nurtured a long line of new writers in the 1970s and 1980s. From there the work travelled to the International Theatre Festival in Toronto in 1981, and Williams found the response in Canada warm enough that he stayed. He became playwright in residence at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre, a company devoted to new Canadian work, and later moved west to Winnipeg, where he taught theatre at the University of Winnipeg. During the Canadian years he wrote a string of further plays, among them The Warlord of Willowdale, The White Dogs of Texas, King of America and Welcome to the NHL, and he acted in works by other writers, including playing opposite Linda Griffiths in her piece The Darling Family.

In 1996 the Cockroach trilogy was adapted as a feature film, The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati, directed by Michael McNamara, with Williams reprising his solo stage performance for the camera. The film earned him a Genie Award nomination for Best Actor at the 18th Genie Awards, the principal Canadian film honours of the period, and it remains the work for which he is best known on the Canadian side of his career. It is also a useful indicator of his range as a performer: a one-man, monologue-driven piece of writing translated to film is a difficult thing to sustain, and the Genie nomination was recognition that he could carry that weight.

By the late 1990s Williams had returned to England, and he settled into the rhythm of the British character actor, moving between film and the steady churn of television. On the big screen he appeared in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake (2004), one of the most acclaimed British films of its decade, contributing to the textured ensemble that gave Leigh's portrait of post-war working-class life its lived-in feel. The same year he appeared in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Stephen Hopkins's HBO biopic of the comedian, in a small but characterful role tied to the Casino Royale sequence. He was later seen in William Monahan's London-set crime drama London Boulevard (2010), starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley, and earlier in Charles Sturridge's The Scold's Bridle.

His television work in the post-Canada years covers much of what a working British character actor would expect to be called for. He appeared in the medical series Always and Everyone, the long-running soap Coronation Street, the crime drama Wire in the Blood, the comedy-drama Life Begins, the historical drama The Virgin Queen, and HBO's Rome. More recent credits include Touching Evil, BBC One's Luther, the cosy-crime perennial Father Brown, the ITV staple Doc Martin, and the Sky comedy Starlings. Across that body of work he has tended to play men slightly bruised by life, fathers and husbands and minor authority figures, and he has been used by directors who value an unfussy, lived-in presence over star wattage.

Alongside his screen career, Williams has continued to write and to perform his own work. In 2015 he toured the play The Girl with Two Voices in Canada, returning to the theatre culture in which his writing first found a home. The dual identity, English actor and Canadian playwright, has been one of the defining features of his career, and one of the reasons his name turns up in two separate national reference works.

Williams's profile is a useful corrective to the assumption that British screen acting is dominated by RADA-trained leads. He is one of a generation, alongside the likes of Paul Copley, Peter Wight and David Bradley, who built their craft in regional touring theatre, who write as well as act, and who have given British and Canadian drama much of its weather. He is not a household name, and he has never tried to be, but in a long line of small and medium parts, in films from Vera Drake to London Boulevard and television from Rome to Father Brown, he has done the kind of work that holds an ensemble together and lets the leads do their job. The Cockroach trilogy and its Genie-nominated film adaptation remain the calling card; the steady decades of character work in British and Canadian production are the body of evidence that backs it up.