James Walker
An English actor whose screen work ran from 1980 to 2006, James Walker built the part of his career that mattered most on stage. He spent a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford between 1992 and 1994, including a foreign tour of The Winter's Tale, and played Albert Einstein in Terry Johnson's Insignificance at Harrogate in 1999.
The film credits gathered here are the supporting kind, and they are better chosen than most. He is Syme, the Newspeak lexicographer who is far too enthusiastic about the dictionary he is helping to shrink, in the 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He turns up in Empire of the Sun, plays a priest in Twelfth Night, and takes a role in the crime picture Scam. Four films is not a filmography, it is a sample, and the stage record is where the substance sits.
Movies (4)
Where to start with James Walker
There is one obvious entry point: Nineteen Eighty-Four. He plays Syme, the film gives the role room, and the picture around him is the best screen Orwell anyone has managed, shot in a grey that gets under your fingernails.
After that, Empire of the Sun for the scale of the thing, Twelfth Night for the Shakespeare that his stage career makes relevant, and Scam if you are completing the set. His theatre work, the RSC season and the Einstein role included, is the part of him no film catalogue can show you.