Timothy Ackroyd
actor
Sir Timothy John Robert Whyte Ackroyd, 3rd Baronet (born 7 October 1958), known as Timothy Ackroyd, is an English actor.
Ackroyd was born on 7 October 1958 to Sir John Robert Whyte Ackroyd, 2nd Baronet, and Jennifer Eileen McLeod Bishop.
Early career
Ackroyd's career began in 1976 when he was nominated as Most Promising Newcomer in the West End Theatre Awards for his performance as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus's Agamemnon. His London début was in Bryan Forbes' controversial and hugely successful Macbeth at The Old Vic; his West End debut was starring opposite Peter O'Toole and Joyce Carey as Ricki-Ticki-Tavy in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Other appearances in the West End include closing down the long-running farce No Sex Please, We're British, Pygmalion with John Thaw, The Rivals playing Sir Anthony Absolute and Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell appearing beside Peter O'Toole and Tom Conti.
He has also served as a National Theatre player and appeared in weekly repertory at Southwold, Chichester, Harrogate, Farnham, Newbury, Glasgow and Leatherhead. After writing and playing William Hogarth in The Compassionate Satirist in collaboration with Brian Sewell and Peter O'Toole, he decided to take a break from the stage in 2007.
I don't know what acting is and anything I've done in the way of work well achieved is entirely owing to the writers
Sir Timothy was generally considered one of the more enigmatic actors of his generation and refused to be interviewed. Peter O'Toole called him "The last of the roaring boys, nothing will hold him at his best, and nothing will wish to hold him at his worst. A throwback certainly, maverick, I could use all the senses used for me, yet at moments here we have genius.
“Timothy Ackroyd” enters the record as actor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Timothy, Ackroyd and actor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7807028. VIAF identifies the subject as 315944480. The Library of Congress control number is no2015058365. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1976 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timothy Ackroyd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.