Crispin Bonham-Carter is a man of the theater. It’s where he likes to be, and it doesn’t matter to him whether he’s on stage or behind the scenes, for he has a parallel career as an actor and as a director. “Maybe I'll never play Hamlet, but I can direct Hamlet,” he has said. “That would be every bit as good, particularly if I thought that person was better cast than I was.”

The Misanthrope, with Elaine Page and John Elmes

As an actor, however, he has not done a great deal of theater. Most of his work has come in television, often as cheerful upper-class types not too dissimilar from Mr. Bingley. Unlike many actors, he doesn’t complain about being typecast. “If I'm playing them well and they are well written then I don't care. People are right for parts or not right for parts. It's as simple as that, really, and I'm sure that there are lots of parts I'm not right for.”

In fact he almost landed the role of Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, but the producers liked the contrast he presented with Colin Firth and so hired him for Bingley instead. Wickham would have been a more interesting role psychologically, Bonham-Carter has said, but he was just thrilled to get the biggest role he had had until then. “Mr. Bingley was a rather naive gentleman growing up; an almost direct parallel to myself at the time,” he says. “But I have to say that there were times when I just seemed to be hearing the director saying, ‘smile, smile, smile.’” Nonetheless, he enjoyed the five-month shoot. His favorite scenes were the big ones, such as the one in which Bingley and Darcy ride into Meryton. The production crew took over the village of Lacock and all the townspeople watched the scene being shot. “That helped, because it was a bit like being on stage then.”

	Victoria and Albert, with Rachel Pickup

Despite his aristocratic-sounding name, Crispin Bonham-Carter comes from the professional upper middle class: his grandfather was in the navy and his father worked in marketing. He did spend most of his boyhood at boarding schools, including seven years at Glenalmond, a boys’ public school in the remote Scottish Grampians. “It was so secluded,” he remembered in a 2005 interview. “For a long time after I left, I felt self-conscious, shy and awkward; an outsider. Being an actor, you don't want to feel those things. Or maybe I became an actor to try to overcome them.” In fact his mother, Clodagh, is an amateur actress and director, and at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, while nominally studying classics, he spent most of his available time with the school’s theater group. Before he had even graduated he landed his first professional job, a one-line cameo (“Here’s your hat, Father”) in the film Howard’s End, which starred his third cousin twice removed, Helena Bonham-Carter. (The two had never even met until Crispin walked up to her during the filming and introduced himself.) He is modest about his break. “I think it was James Ivory thinking, ‘How amusing, to put this other Bonham-Carter in as well.’”

Cadfael, with Margery Mason

With television work paying the bills, Bonham-Carter can concentrate on the theater. “Directing is a way of taking control, of seeing something through from beginning to end,” he said in 2000. “Actors are always the last people to be informed.” He has slowly been building a CV in directing, with work at drama schools and in fringe venues, and in 2001 won the Jerwood Young Directors Award. In 2003 he directed a new play called Stealing Sweets and Punching People by Phil Porter, and received laudatory reviews—critics called his production “vivid,” “darkly beguiling,” and “surreal and poetic.” I’m part of a tiny community of theatre nerds,” he says with a smile. “It's probably good that Katie’s not an actor, or I’d waffle on about nothing else.” Katie, his wife, is in fact a teacher. They met at the University of St. Andrews and were married in 1996. They live in the Muswell Hill section of London with their three sons, Arthur, Kit, and Stanley.