Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis is an American actor born on November 26, 1945, in Gurdon, Arkansas, who grew up in Little Rock, where his parents operated a cinema. His first acting experience came at age eleven, when he was cast in a local broadcast program called Betty's Little Rascals. Davis graduated from Hall High School in Little Rock in 1964 and subsequently earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Arkansas Arts Center. He went on to work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and spent six years with the American Conservatory Theater, where he also taught acting classes.

Davis made his Broadway debut as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus in 1980, launching a stage career that would span from 1969 to 2016. His Broadway credits include Wrong Mountain, for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2000, as well as La Cage aux Folles, in which he co-starred with Gary Beach from November 2004 to March 2005. Additional Broadway appearances include The Frogs, in which he portrayed George Bernard Shaw in 2004, The Invention of Love, where he played Oscar Wilde in 2001, and a 2016 Roundabout Theatre revival of Noises Off at the American Airlines Theatre, in which he appeared as Selsdon Mowbray. Off-Broadway, his roles included Rubin in Lake No Bottom in 1990, the Duke of Buckingham in The Tragedy of Richard III, and Gaev in The Cherry Orchard in 2011. Beyond New York, Davis portrayed King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in July 2008 under the direction of Bonnie J. Monte, and played Prospero in The Tempest at Hartford Stage in 2012. He has also performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On television, Davis first gained attention in daytime programming playing Elliot Carrington opposite Beverlee McKinsey on the soap opera Texas, a spin-off of Another World, from October 1980 to December 1981. In 1985, he appeared in the Season 4 A-Team episode "The Doctor is Out" as a renegade soldier. His most prominent television role came with the sitcom The Nanny, which ran from 1993 to 1999, in which he played Niles the butler, a character known for deadpan one-liners frequently directed at C. C. Babcock, with whom Niles ultimately fell in love and married in the series' final season. Davis reprised the role in a reunion special in 2004. Although his natural accent is Southern American, his English dialect as Niles was widely perceived by viewers as authentically British.

Davis played Professor Moriarty in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle," again employing a received pronunciation English dialect, and later reprised the role in the third season of Star Trek: Picard. In the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October, he appeared as the commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, speaking in his own American dialect. He appeared briefly in Christopher Nolan's 2006 film The Prestige, and in 2012 recorded the audiobook of the Star Wars novel Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. His additional television guest appearances include Frasier in 2002, playing Dr. Shafer in Season 10, and Ugly Betty in 2008.