Bill Nighy

Bill Nighy is a British actor born William Francis Nighy on 12 December 1949 in Caterham, Surrey. His accolades include two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Theatre World Award, and nominations for an Academy Award, a Tony Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Nighy was raised Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy before giving up practicing the faith as a teenager. He attended the John Fisher School, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Purley, where he earned the nickname "Knucks" on account of his hands and first appeared in school plays. He left school at fifteen without qualifications and subsequently traveled to Paris with a friend in an unsuccessful attempt to write a novel. After working at a local employment office and as a messenger for The Croydon Advertiser and The Field, he applied to RADA, was rejected, and instead trained at the Guildford School of Dance and Drama.

His early professional work took him through regional theatres including the Cambridge Arts Theatre and Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre before he joined the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where he worked alongside Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite, and writers Ken Campbell and Willy Russell. He was also a member of the travelling theatre group Van Load, which included writer and director David Hare. Nighy made his London stage debut at the National Theatre on 4 March 1977, when the Cottesloe Theatre opened with an epic staging of Ken Campbell and Chris Langham's Illuminatus!. At the National he was subsequently cast in two David Hare premieres, A Map of the World and Pravda, the latter in 1985. He appeared in three episodes of the BBC anthology series Play for Today between 1978 and 1982, played Samwise Gamgee in the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings, and was heard in the 1980s BBC Radio version of Yes Minister.

Further stage acclaim came with Shakespeare's King Lear in 1986, Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the Almeida Theatre in 1991, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the National Theatre in 1993, in which he played the unscrupulous university don Bernard Nightingale opposite Felicity Kendal, and Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in 1994. In 1997 he starred as restaurant entrepreneur Tom Sergeant in Hare's Skylight at the Vaudeville Theatre. He played a consultant psychiatrist in Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange in 2000, a performance that earned him a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination when the production transferred to the Duchess Theatre in the West End.

Nighy's Broadway career spanned 2006 to 2015. He appeared in David Hare's The Vertical Hour in 2006 and returned to Broadway in Hare's Skylight in 2015, receiving a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination for the latter. His Broadway work was recognized with a Theatre World Award in 2007.

On screen, one of his early prominent roles was in the BBC serial The Men's Room in 1991, which he credited with launching his career. He portrayed the fictional rock star Ray Simms in the 1998 film Still Crazy and played the amateur sleuth Charles Paris on BBC Radio 4 from 1999 onward, appearing in the role at least seventeen times. International recognition came with the 2003 British romantic comedy Love Actually, in which he played irreverent rock legend Billy Mack, earning him the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. That same year he began portraying the vampire elder Viktor in the Underworld film series, a role he reprised in Underworld: Evolution in 2006 and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans in 2009. He won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor in 2004 for the BBC series State of Play and received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the BBC film Gideon's Daughter in 2007.

His subsequent film credits include Shaun of the Dead (2004), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), the Pirates of the Caribbean film series as Davy Jones (2006–2007), Hot Fuzz (2007), Valkyrie (2008), Wild Target (2010), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), About Time (2013), Emma (2020), and Living (2022). His performance in Living earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His television work includes The Girl in the Café (2006), the BBC's Worricker trilogy comprising Page Eight (2012), Turks & Caicos (2014), and Salting the Battlefield (2014), and the BBC's Ordeal by Innocence (2018).