David Bamber
David Bamber is an actor, born 1954.
Bamber played Mr Collins in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice and has arguably owned the part ever since. It is a performance built on physical discomfort: the bows are slightly too deep, the compliments are rehearsed, and the self-regard reads as a nervous condition rather than simple vanity. Thirty years on it is still the version people picture.
That established the specialty. He plays officials, clerics and functionaries whose sense of their own importance is either the joke or the horror. Cicero in Rome is the best of them and the least like the schoolbook figure: a physical coward with the sharpest political mind in the series, switching sides with an apologetic wince, and Bamber makes the cowardice sympathetic without excusing it. Valkyrie asked for the opposite kind of nerve, a small and unglamorous Hitler in the middle of a thriller, and he plays him as an ordinary irritable man, which is far more unpleasant than a monster.
The rest is a British character career of the old kind, moving between prestige film and ordinary television without any visible change in effort: Admiral Ramsay in Darkest Hour, a magistrate in Peterloo, Lord Arran in A Very English Scandal, Schiff in The Regime, a consulate clerk in The Bourne Identity, plus Mike Leigh's High Hopes, Psychoville, Plebs and Midsomer Murders.
Movies (13)
TV (15)
Where to start with David Bamber
Everyone recommends Pride and Prejudice first and everyone is right. Watch how much of Mr Collins is done with posture: the man is physically wrong in every room he enters.
Rome is the better performance, though. Cicero appears in both seasons and Bamber turns what could be a stock political survivor into the most human figure in a series full of soldiers.
Then pick by register. Valkyrie for the most unsettling piece of casting, A Very English Scandal for the comedy of English respectability, High Hopes for the young Mike Leigh grotesque, Darkest Hour and Peterloo for the historical supporting work. The Regime is the most recent and the most enjoyably arch.
The costume drama
Mr Collins is the performance he will never escape, and it deserves that: an entire character built out of misplaced confidence, played without a single wink to the audience. The rest is a long career in British period television.
The historical and political work
Cicero in Rome is the serious counterweight and the best thing on this list, two seasons of a clever man surviving by being useful. Valkyrie, Darkest Hour and Peterloo put him in the same historical register on film.
The comedies
The comic work is where he is least expected and most enjoyable. Psychoville is the Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton horror comedy, and Plebs is the broad Roman sitcom that is nothing whatever like Rome.