The year 1994 was a turning point in David Bamber’s career. In April he opened in a new play called My Night With Reg at the Royal Court, London, winning some of the best notices of his life and, later on, an Olivier award for Best Actor. And in June he began playing Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, the role for which, ten years later, he is still best remembered. So big an impression did these roles make on casting directors that he has become something of a specialist in playing gay and repressed men as well as over-the-top comic characters.

	My Night with Reg, with John Sessions and Anthony Calf

My Night With Reg, by Kevin Elyot, was one of the first successful British plays to treat homo-sexuality as an ordinary fact of life. Bamber played Guy, a nice-guy advertising copywriter who has long nurtured a secret love for his former schoolmate, John (played by Anthony Calf). “He is lonely and diffident and convinced he is unloveable,” wrote John Gross in the Sunday Times. “All of which [Bamber] brilliantly convey[s]. Every wry little grimace rings true, every hesitant gesture: it is in many respects a comic performance, but a progressively painful one as well.” Charles Spencer of the Telegraph agreed. “There is no doubt that the finest acting comes from David Bamber as the hapless Guy, liked by everyone and fancied by no one. There is a feeling of bravely-borne sorrow here that seems to encapsulate all that is best in this wise, deeply affecting and compassionate play.” And Benedict Nightingale wrote in the daily Times, “Bamber is one of our finest yet least recognised comic actors. Here, he outdoes even himself, twitching and wincing and obsessively pushing back his hair in what is eventually revealed as an agony of embarrassed hope.”

The Glee Club

Bamber’s physicality as an actor is a quality mentioned in most reviews of his performances. Of his work in Richard Cameron’s play The Glee Club in 2003, the Daily Mail wrote, “brilliant David Bamber, contorting his simplest body movement into a question mark, suggests a world of misunderstood frustration.” When he doubled the roles of Mr. Darling and Captain Hook in a 1996 production of Peter Pan, the Times noted that he “develop[ed] mannerisms so that the agitated hands of one inspire the scampering feet of the other.” In the 1992 Edinburgh Festival production of Schippel the Plumber, “his entire performance seemed to be some painfully protracted physiognomical wince” (the Observer). As the corruptible hero of Howard Korder’s Search and Destroy, “Bamber's intensely physical performance, stammering and almost clownish at times of stress, traces the departure of dignity, naivety, honour, virtue,” wrote the Times. There are those who find this physicality superficial. Nicholas de Jongh, in the Evening Standard, found Bamber’s Antonio in Trevor Nunn’s 1999 National Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice histrionic, “waving or shaking his arms in silly little circles or flapping and shaking his hands and wrists.” But most critics have pointed out that underneath all this activity lies work of sensitivity and depth. “[H]is performances consistently generate a sense of purpose and integrity,” wrote the critic Michael Coveney. And in the Times, Benedict Nightingale said, “he's unsurpassed when it comes to bringing comic life to odd, edgy, insecure, soft, vulnerable characters.”

	The Merchant of Venice, with Henry Goodman

Bamber was born, on September 19, 1954, in Walkden, a small town halfway between Manchester and Bolton. The youngest of four children of a miner and a nurse, his first acting experience was playing Shylock at the Manchester Youth Theatre as a teenager. Nonetheless, he didn’t originally think he could ever act professionally. “I had very little confidence, and thought I would probably just teach drama,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “I assumed that people like me didn't become actors.” He won a place in a college that would have trained him to teach drama to special education students, but at the last minute changed his mind and went to Bristol University to study acting. He did well enough to win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), where he won several prizes as well as the gold medal. His training there had him “frequently drinking out of goblets with a sword in the other hand. I remember thinking, ‘I'm dying to drink coffee on stage and sit on sofas and things.’”

Troilus and Cressida, with Peter de Jersey and Sophie Okonedo

He needn’t have worried. Although he’s done the occasional Shakespeare (mostly for the National Theatre, not the Royal Shakespeare Company), most of his stage work has been in contemporary plays, including many new ones. He’s even absorbed some non-RADA acting techniques: rehearsing David Hare’s Racing Demon at the National in 1990, he worried so much about what his character was feeling that his colleague Michael Bryant nicknamed him Marlon. The success of My Night With Reg led directors to think of him when casting gay characters: he has played them in The Glee Club and Terrence McNally’s The Lisbon Traviata, and even his Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida “clearly ha[d] the hots for Troilus and [could] hardly keep his constantly wandering hands off the dear boy” and his Antonio in The Merchant of Venice (which is also available on video) was “a brooding, middle-aged depressive who had long sublimated his secret love for Bassanio into being a self-absorbed businessman.”

	Chalk

Public acclaim for his portrayal of Mr. Collins was not something Bamber expected. After it aired he was, as the saying goes, a “name in the corridor” at the BBC. "I think what I was surprised at was the impact it had," he said in 1997. “That character seemed to get a lot of response. I suppose I'd been doing that sort of thing for a long time, it's just it had usually been in front of fifty people at the Bush [Theatre].” He was offered many sitcoms, and finally chose one called Chalk, in which he played the tyrannical deputy headmaster of a secondary school who has seized power from his flaky boss. The show stirred some controversy when it was first broadcast due to complaints that it presented the teaching profession in an unflattering light, but it did well enough to be renewed for a second season.

Master Class, with Peter Kelly, Timothy West, and Jonathan Adams

Bamber married Julia Swift, an actress, in 1982, and they have two sons — Theo, born in 1991, and Ethan, born 1998. They live in north London, where David is a keen cook and enjoys playing the piano and listening to music. And his confidence has grown considerably from his schooldays in Lancashire. “I am a good actor and I play supporting roles really well,” he has said. “But I have no trouble carrying a play, to be perfectly honest. I am no more averse to playing the lead than to playing the support. What you do as an actor is serve the play.”