Martin Shaw

Martin Shaw is an English actor born on 21 January 1945 in Birmingham, where he grew up in the Erdington and Sutton Coldfield areas. He attended Great Barr School, where he demonstrated particular aptitude in English literature and drama. Shaw declined a scholarship to a Birmingham drama school at sixteen, and at eighteen relocated to London to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Following his graduation from LAMDA, he served as an assistant stage manager at the Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch and the Bristol Old Vic, building his early professional foundation in repertory theatre.

Shaw's stage career spans several decades and encompasses significant classical and contemporary work. Among his early theatrical credits are a key role in the first revival of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court and Criterion in 1968, a part in the National Theatre's Saturday, Sunday, Monday opposite Laurence Olivier in 1973, and the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1974, a role Shaw later identified as a career breakthrough. In 1985, he played Elvis Presley in Alan Bleasdale's Are You Lonesome Tonight?, a production depicting Presley's final hours that ran in London before touring Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide.

Shaw's Broadway appearance came in 1996, when he portrayed Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. The performance earned him a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play and a Theatre World Special Award, both in 1996. His stage work continued with the role of Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, a production in which his daughter Sophie appeared opposite him as More's daughter Margaret. The production toured British cities before playing the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London, and Shaw reprised the role at the same venue in summer 2025. In 2013, he played the dissenting juror number eight in a production of Twelve Angry Men at the Garrick Theatre in London. Subsequent stage work included a 2016 production of Hobson's Choice at the Vaudeville and a 2017 tour of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, in which he played former US Secretary of State William Russell.

Shaw first came to widespread public attention through television, beginning work in the medium in 1967. Early roles included hippy student Robert Croft in Coronation Street and Welsh medical student Huw Evans in Doctor in the House and its follow-up series Doctor at Large. International audiences encountered him as Horatio in the 1970 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Hamlet, starring Richard Chamberlain. His most prominent early television role was Ray Doyle in the ITV crime-action series The Professionals, which ran from 1977 to 1983 opposite Lewis Collins. In 1983, he played Robert Falcon Scott in The Last Place on Earth, filmed at Frobisher Bay near Iqaluit on Baffin Island, Canada, and Sir Henry Baskerville in The Hound of the Baskervilles alongside Ian Richardson and Donald Churchill. He played Cecil Rhodes in the eight-part serial Rhodes in 1996, filmed on location in South Africa, with his younger son Joe appearing as the young Rhodes. Shaw took the title role in The Chief for ITV in the 1990s, and in 2001 began playing the title role in the BBC drama Judge John Deed, which ran until 2007. Between seasons of that series, he portrayed forensic detective Adam Dalgliesh in Death in Holy Orders in 2003 and The Murder Room in 2005. From 2007 to 2017, Shaw played the title role in the BBC series Inspector George Gently. In 2021, he appeared as Dennis Stephenson, leader of a fictitious religious cult called the Barum Brethren, in the BritBox original series The Long Call, based on Ann Cleeves's novel.

Shaw's film work includes the role of Banquo in Roman Polanski's 1971 Macbeth, an undercover operative in the 1975 production Operation Daybreak, the character Rachid in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1973, and a fugitive villain in Ladder of Swords in 1989. Beyond acting, Shaw has narrated numerous audiobooks, among them Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. He presented the six-part Discovery Channel series Martin Shaw: Aviators in December 2006, which followed the two-year restoration of his Boeing Stearman biplane, and in 2010 presented the BBC documentary Dambusters Declassified, in which he examined the history of Operation Chastise.