David Ashton
He was on a film set before he finished drama school. Ashton trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London between 1964 and 1967, and rode through Carry On Cowboy uncredited in 1965. The credits held here run from that to Glenrothan in 2026, which is a working life measured in decades rather than roles.
The screen work is the sort that keeps a Scottish character actor employed indefinitely, usually in uniform or behind a desk. He is the First Sea Lord in Tomorrow Never Dies, delivering naval bad news in a Bond film's war room. He is Dr Garrigan senior in The Last King of Scotland, Major Lennox in Sharpe's Eagle, a radio operator in Eye of the Needle, a lawyer in The House of Mirth, Major Roddy Maclean on Hamish Macbeth and Dr McDuff on Brass. Authority figures, most of them, played without fuss.
The writing is the other half and arguably the better one. He writes fiction, screenplays for film and television, and plays for theatre and radio, and his radio play The Old Ladies at the Zoo, starring Peggy Mount and Liz Smith, won the Radio Times Drama Award in 1985. Radio drama is a small world with a long memory, and it is the place where the name on the work is his own rather than a character's.
Movies (7)
TV (2)
Where to start with David Ashton
The easiest place to spot him is Tomorrow Never Dies, briefing a Bond film's naval command with total conviction, and it is a useful demonstration of what a real stage actor brings to ninety seconds of exposition.
For something with more weight, The Last King of Scotland casts him as the doctor father whose disapproval sets the whole story moving, in a couple of scenes that have to carry an entire backstory. Sharpe's Eagle gives him Major Lennox in the best-remembered of the Napoleonic television films.
Hamish Macbeth is the comfortable choice, a Highland series with a peculiar tone he fits neatly into, and Eye of the Needle is the early thriller worth digging out. The House of Mirth is the prestige literary adaptation on the list, and Glenrothan is the newest credit, six decades after the first.