Simon MacCorkindale
Simon MacCorkindale is an actor, born 1952.
Poor eyesight kept Simon MacCorkindale out of the Royal Air Force, where his father served, so he set out to become a theatre director instead and ended up acting: training in London, a West End debut in 1974, and an unnamed helmsman in Juggernaut the same year.
Television did the rest. He was Lucius in Jesus of Nazareth, then Simon Doyle in the 1978 Death on the Nile, the film that sold him internationally as a particular kind of Englishman, handsome, well spoken and plausible in linen. American producers bought that image and put it straight into genre pictures.
So he is the shark hunting showman Philip FitzRoyce in Jaws 3-D, Mikah in The Sword and the Sorcerer, Joe Kapp in The Quatermass Conclusion, and, to a certain kind of viewer, permanently Jonathan Chase in Manimal, the detective who solves crimes by turning into animals. Falcon Crest gave him a run as Greg Reardon in American primetime soap, and Counterstrike and Relic Hunter kept him in syndicated adventure television.
He also worked as a director, writer and producer, and he kept acting to the end: Harry Harper in the BBC hospital series Casualty, which is where a generation of British viewers knows him from, and the horror film 13Hrs, from 2010, the year he died.
Movies (7)
TV (8)
Where to start with Simon MacCorkindale
Watch Death on the Nile before anything else, both because it is the best film he appeared in and because his Simon Doyle is the performance every later casting director was buying a copy of.
Then pick a genre. Jaws 3-D is bad in the specific, watchable way that third sequels shot in 3-D are bad, and he is one of the few people in it who looks like he is enjoying himself. Manimal is the cult item, a premise so silly it became shorthand for a certain kind of eighties television. The Sword and the Sorcerer belongs to the same early eighties fantasy boom and knows it.
For the serious end, Jesus of Nazareth uses the young stage actor properly, and The Quatermass Conclusion is grim late seventies British science fiction that has aged better than its reputation. Casualty is the long-running day job.