John Rhys-Davies

At 80 years old, John Rhys-Davies has this physical status:

John Rhys-Davies (born 5 May 1944) is a Welsh actor, voice actor and producer, known for his portrayal of Gimli and the voice of Treebeard in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sallah in the Indiana Jones films and Cmdr.

Hammerstock-Smythe in The Medallion.

He also played Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shogun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and Macro in I, Claudius.

He provided the voices of Cassim in Aladdin and the King of Thieves, Ranjan's father in The Jungle Book 2, Man Ray in SpongeBob SquarePants, Hades in Justice League and Tobias in the computer game Freelancer.

Early life

John Rhys-Davies was born in Salisbury on 5 May 1944, the son of Welsh parents. His mother, Phyllis Jones, was a nurse, while his father, Rhys Davies, was a mechanical engineer and colonial officer.

Due to his father's work as a colonial police officer, he was raised in Tanganyika (today part of Tanzania) before his family moved to the Welsh town of Ammanford. While in Tanganyika, his family lived in places such as Dar es Salaam, Kongwa, Moshi, and Mwanza. He was educated at independent Truro School in Cornwall and then at the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first 105 students admitted and became a co-founder of its drama club. After a stint teaching at a secondary school in Watton, Norfolk, he won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

Personal life

Rhys-Davies married Suzanne Wilkinson in December 1966, and they had two sons together. Although they legally separated in 1985, they remained married until her death from Alzheimer's disease in 2010. They remained friends, and he took care of her in her final years.

In 2004, Rhys-Davies began dating Lisa Manning. They have a daughter together, and split their time between homes in the New Zealand region of Waikato and on the Isle of Man.

Rhys-Davies is a self-described "rationalist" and "sceptic" when it comes to religion. However, he holds Christianity in high regard and has stated that "Christian civilisation has made the world a better place than it ever was".

In February 2020, Rhys-Davies stated, "All the things that we value, the right of free speech, the right of the individual conscience, these evolved in first and second century Roman Christendom, where the individual Christian said, 'I have a right to believe, [sic] what I believe and not what the Emperor tells me.' From that our whole idea of democracy and the equality that we have has developed. We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have, and to slight it and to dismiss it as being irrelevant is the detritus of rather ill-read minds, I think."

Rhys-Davies has played roles in several Christian films, including Mordecai in One Night with the King (2006), Charles Kemp in Beyond the Mask (2015), Saint Peter in The Apostle Peter: Redemption (2016), the Evangelist in The Pilgrim's Progress (2019), and Saint Patrick in I Am Patrick (2020).

Rhys-Davies is not a member of any political party. He was a radical leftist as a university student in the 1960s, but changed his views when he went to heckle Margaret Thatcher, who he said "shot down the first two hecklers in such brilliant fashion that [he] decided [he] ought for once to shut up and listen".

In 2004, Rhys-Davies said in an interview with World magazine, "There is a demographic catastrophe happening in Europe that nobody wants to talk about, that we daren't bring up because we are so cagey about not offending people racially. And rightly we should be. But there is a cultural thing as well. By 2020, 50% of the children in Holland under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent." In an interview with the conservative journal National Review, he said that he is opposed to Islamic extremism because he feels that it violates the "Western values" of equality, democracy, tolerance, and the abolition of slavery.

Rhys-Davies was vocal about his support for Brexit. On 25 April 2019, he appeared as a panellist on the BBC's Question Time, where his conduct was described as "thuggish and sexist" by some viewers after he shouted "oh, woman!" at Green Party politician Caroline Lucas when she commented on Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Source

Career

In the early 1970s, Rhys-Davies appeared on UK television frequently, including his appearance on "Laughing Spam Fritter" opposite Adam Faith in Budgie. In I, Claudius, he later played Praetorian officer Naevius Macro. He continued to appear in the 1980 television miniseries Shogun, based on James Clavell's book, and as Sallah in two of Indiana Jones films, but not just in the United Kingdom.

In 1989, he appeared in The Trial of the Incredible Hulk as the Marvel Comics Kingpin. Quillian Gornt, Rhys-Davies' corporate competitor, appeared in another Clavell adaptation, Noble House, which is set in Hong Kong. He has since appeared in numerous television shows and miniseries, including Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, as well as a lead role in the television series Sliders as Professor Maximillian Arturo from 1995 to 1997.

In 1983, he appeared in Reilly, Ace of Spies, as a holodeck of Leonardo da Vinci, starred as an ally of James Bond in The Living Daylights, and appeared in One Night with the King. Davies has appeared in two separate projects; a two-part episode of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne; and the Hallmark Channel film La Femme Musketeer. He appears in the full motion video cut scenes of computer games, including Ripper (as Vigo Haman) (1996), Dune 2000 (as No. 5) (1998), and the Wing Commander series (as James Taggart) (1998), and the third game in the series's third game.

He narrated The Privileged Planet, a documentary that supports intelligent design in 2004. He appeared on the family history show Coming Home, in which he discovered traces of his grandfather's life in the Carmarthenshire coal mines.

In 2014, he joined the cast of Metal Hurlant Chronicles to portray Holgarth, an immortal alchemist.

He was involved in the single-player campaign of PC game Star Citizen in 2015 alongside Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman. The project consisted of complete body motion recording, including facial expressions and his voice; it was mostly shot at the Imaginarium studios in the United Kingdom.

In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Rhys-Davies appeared as the dwarf Gimli. The cinematography of the films was aided in that Rhys-Davies is tall (6 ft 1 in (1.85 m), as opposed to the actors playing hobbits at 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m). Therefore, although his character was supposed to be short, he was still in proportion when compared to the hobbit actors. Had he been of a more resembled height, photographs of the entire fellowship might have required three camera passes rather than two.

Rhys-Davies is the only one of the nine Fellowship of the Ring actors with a tattoo of the word "nine" in the Tengwar script; his stunt double, Brett Beattie, was offered the tattoo instead, but Beattie had been disinclined to get one himself, and Beattie had spent so long as his double that he almost earned co-credit.

Rhys-Davies had severe reactions to the prosthetics used during filming, and his eyes sometimes swelled shut. When asked whether he'd like to reprise his role in The Hobbit's film version, he replied, "I have already completely ruled it out." I'm a sentimental person who would like to be involved again. Well, I'm not positive that my face will withstand this kind of punishment any more." This time around, he said, "You've got a different set of challenges, because you've got 13 dwarves, a whole band of them... You're trying to do for dwarves what The Lord of the Rings did for hobbits." In 2011, he offered his assistance as a dwarf advisor, but he was refused to return as Gimli in The Hobbit due to the punishing makeup required.

Rhys-Davies, Sean Astin, Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Dominic Monaghan, Miranda Otto, Matthew Hamilton, Karl Urban, and Elijah Wood, alongside writer Philippa Boyens and director Peter Jackson, reunites the cast of famous films through videoconferencing and promotes non-profit charities.

Rhys-Davies has appeared in many video games and animated television series, including those of Man Ray in SpongeBob SquarePants' origins and many times in Gargoyles (1994–1996) as the character Macbeth, as the character Macbeth. He also appeared in The Legends of Shadows of Darkness, as the actor in Lord of the Rings. He appeared on Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance as Jherek, and narrated a film called The Glory of Macedonia.

On the 2009 film Reclaim The Blade, John Rhys-Davies' voice can be heard. Rhys-Davies discusses swords, historical European swordsmanship, and fight choreography on film, a subject that is all familiar to him from his time in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which his character wielded an axe in several scenes.

He was the unknowing subject of a internet prank that spread debunked myths in several mainstream media outlets that he was supposed to appear in Star Wars Episode III.

Rhys-Davies is the narrator of The Truth & Life Dramatized audiobook version of the New Testament, which is a 22-hour, celebrity-voiced, fully dramatised audiobook version of the New Testament that uses the Revised Standard Version-Catholic Version translation. He released KJB: The Book That Changed the World in 2011, which featured him reading various excerpts from King James' Book.

Voice-over work with Breathe Bible is also included in John Rhys-Davies' voice.

He wrote the first word for Voices of Fire, the sixth album by a cappella power metal band van Canto, in 2016.

John Rhys-Davies, a resident of the Isle of Man since 1988, gives the island's Castle Rushen, one of Britain's oldest medieval fortresses. He lent his voice to the Isle of Man's tourism industry in 2018.

In the 1993 Williams SuperPin Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure, Rhys-Davies' voice was recorded for some of the callouts.

Source