SHAKESPEARE UNCOVERED
PANELIST BIOGRAPHIES
Tuesday, January 15, 2012, 11:15 a.m.-12 noon
Jeremy Irons, Actor & Host (Henry IV and Henry V)
Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award® for Best Actor for his performance as Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune. He is also a Golden Globe® Award, Primetime Emmy® Award, Tony Award®, and SAG Award® winner.
The British Irons has an extraordinary legacy of film, television and theatre performances, including The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which he starred opposite Meryl Streep; The Mission; and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. Irons starred in Damage and M. Butterfly before he made pop culture history as the voice of the evil lion Scar in Disney’s classic The Lion King. Irons showed his grasp of the action genre starring opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard: With a Vengeance, and also starred as Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne’s Lolita. Other career highlights include Being Julia with Annette Bening; Appaloosa with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen; and Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Irons received a Tony for his performance in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and most recently appeared in London in the National Theatre’s Never so Good and in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Gods Weep. Irons is probably best known for his role as Charles Ryder in the cult TV serial Brideshead Revisited, which aired here on PBS’ Great Performances. Irons joined Helen Mirren and director, Tom Hooper in the award-winning television miniseries Elizabeth I. He was also recently lauded for his portrayal of iconic photographer Alfred Stieglitz in the award-winning biographical picture Georgia O’Keeffe.
Irons’ latest role sees him taking on the mantle of the eponymous Rodrigo Borgia in Showtime’s epic TV drama series The Borgias, now in its third season of production. In 2012 Irons was also seen on the big screen in the award-winning independent feature Margin Call with Kevin Spacey and The Words, with Bradley Cooper, the closing night feature at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Also in 2012, Irons played Henry IV, directed by Richard Eyre, in a series of three films for the “Cultural Olympiad for Britain 2012”: Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, and Richard II — BBC2 adaptations for a Shakespeare season created in collaboration with Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes. (These will air on PBS’ Great Performances in the fall of 2013.) Irons has also completed production on The Night Train to Lisbon, directed by Bille August, as well as Beautiful Creatures, shot in Louisiana and directed by Richard LaGravenese. Irons adds executive producer and featured actor credits in TRASHED, a Blenheim Production feature documentary directed by Candida Brady, which received a special screening at the 2012 Cannes film festival.
Richard Denton, Series Producer
Richard Denton is a producer with decades of experience in documentary television, including films on the arts, nature and religion. Recent credits include Jonathan Miller’s three-part series on atheism, A Brief History of Disbelief, which aired on public television in the U.S., and The Search for the Garden of Eden for Discovery. Earlier films include Comrades, an award-winning series about the Soviet Union, with WGBH; Elementary My Dear Viewer, Richard E. Grant’s guide to Sherlock Holmes; Ancient Voices, a 20-part history series; and A Visit From Vanya, about the Moscow Arts Theatre’s visit to Oxford to work on a production of Uncle Vanya. His many awards include the BAFTA (the British equivalent of the Oscar).
Denton served for six years as commissioning editor of the documentary series Everyman for BBC Religious Programs and for two years as head of documentaries for Planet Wild. He is the founder and managing director of the independent production company 116 Films. Denton conceived of Shakespeare Uncovered and is its primary writer/producer; he produced the Series One programs on the Henrys and the two Comedies.
Stephen Segaller, Executive in Charge
Stephen Segaller oversees all national and local programming from WNET.ORG’s producing subsidiaries – THIRTEEN, WLIW21, and Creative News Group. Among these productions are Nature, Great Performances, American Masters, Secrets of the Dead, Need To Know, Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, Cyberchase, SundayArts, and Reel 13; and documentary series featuring Henry Louis Gates Jr., Niall Ferguson, Simon Schama, and Alan Alda, among others.
Previously, as director of news and public affairs programming, Segaller executive-produced documentary series and co-productions such as Ascent of Money and The War of the World, both with Niall Ferguson; Extreme Oil; Red Gold: The Epic Story of Blood; Local News; and the Fred Friendly Seminars; individual documentaries such as Leslie Woodhead’s award-winning Srebrenica – A Cry From the Grave; David Grubin’s Kofi Annan: Center of the Storm; Brook Lapping’s Maggie: Prime Minister Thatcher and The Blair Decade; Simon Berthon’s Allies at War; Walter Cronkite’s last two documentaries, City At War: London Calling and Legacy of War; the films of Frederick Wiseman; and films by Roger Weisberg, including the Academy Award-nominated Sound and Fury.
He created the international documentary series Wide Angle and the investigative journalism series Exposé. In 2008-09 he was executive in charge for Worldfocus, a daily global news program built on new technology, content partnerships and web-transmission. In 2010, international and investigative coverage were combined into Need To Know, a weekly primetime current affairs show that runs year-round on PBS.
In 2011, he was executive in charge of the groundbreaking documentary series Women, War & Peace – produced by Abigail Disney, Gini Reticker, and Pamela Hogan – the first series ever to consider war, conflict and peacemaking from the point of view of women as combatants, casualties, and peacemakers.