Michael Daviot

 

                                MINI-BIOGRAPHY AND C.V.

 

Michael was born and schooled in Edinburgh. He spent 5 years in the Civil Service before going to (as it then was) Queen Margaret College. His first play, 'The Knight From Nowhere' (about Henry Irving), was commissioned and performed by the Royal Lyceum Theatre as part of its Centenary Season in 1983. Until 1991 he worked mostly in Scotland, at the Brunton, Pitlochry, Dundee Rep etc., though in 1989 he was lucky enough to tour with Derek Jacobi for several months in Richard II and Richard III.

In winter '90/'91 he was Henry Higgins in Pygmalion for an English and European tour and, immediately afterwards, he went for 6 months to Pitlochry Rep. After playing a season there with the great Walter Carr, Michael went to St Albans to play the Big Bad Wolf in Red Riding Hood - and stayed there for the next 15 years. For the last 4 years of his Southern Sojourn, he lived in Bedford.

While in England, he played Elyot Chase in Private Lives at the Redgrave Theatre, Farnham; Giles Ralston in the West End production of The Mousetrap; Modest Tchaikovsky in Who Killed Tchaikovsy; Prospero in The Tempest, Dafydd ap Llewellyn in A Chorus of Disapproval; W B Yeats in A Vision; Buckingham in Richard III; Robert Louis Stevenson in Ultimate Islands, Falstaff (!) in Chimes at Midnight; Leontes in The Winter's Tale etc.

Michael returned to Scotland and Edinburgh at the end of 2010. Since then he has met and made eight films with Craig-James Moncur, from the YouTube hit, The Banker, to the full length feature, Skeletons; he has appeared in Mary of the High Seas as a singing pirate captain; played the nasty Laird in Macpherson's Rant; he has done much voice-over and role play work; he appeared in Outlander (as a Highland Prisoner); played Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard for Theatre Alba, The Parson in the major revival of Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, himself and several others (including his beloved RLS) in the critically acclaimed Hyde & Seek, Samuel Goudsmit in a major Japanese TV production, Atomic Espionage, and The Actor/Baron in The Lower Depths. This last performance was described by Thom Dibdin as 'magnificent'. This made Michael extremely happy.

He wrote the text for Nijinsky's Last Jump, which has just finished a rave-reviewed run at the Edinburgh Fringe, receiving 4 **** reviews and 3 *****.

He has recently finished writing Nosferatu, The Actor - his new solo show -about the life and work of the iconic but unknown Max Schreck.