Biography
With lean hangdog looks that make him a natural for the criminals and fringe dwellers he usually plays, Tim Roth has the uncanny and incredibly effective ability to make sleaze look sexy, or at least raggedly photogenic. Since his debut in the made-for-TV
Made in Britain at the age of 18, Roth has joined fellow Briton
Gary Oldman as one of the leading interpreters of society's underbelly. His ability has been particularly appreciated by director
Quentin Tarantino, who helped to propel Roth to international recognition with prominent roles in Resevoir Dogs and
Pulp Fiction in the early '90s. Since then, Roth has continued to portray a variety of gritty characters, occasionally making room for the odd sympathetic or lighthearted role.
Born in London on May 14, 1961, to a journalist father and landscape painter mother, Roth initially wanted to become a sculptor. After an education at London's Camberwell School of Art, he decided to try his hand at acting, first appearing in a production of
Jean Genet's The Screens. Roth's television debut in the 1981 film
Made in Britain garnered critical raves for the actor, who portrayed a poverty-stricken juvenile delinquent with profanity-spewing gusto. The same year, he appeared with
Gary Oldman in
Mike Leigh's
Meantime, a made-for-TV movie that was eventually released theatrically, but Roth's bona fide screen debut didn't come until 1984, when he played an apprentice hitman in
Stephen Frears'
The Hit. Co-starring
Terence Stamp and
John Hurt, the film did moderately well and earned Roth an Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Thanks to such positive notices, the young actor continued to find work throughout the rest of the decade, making appearances in a variety of films, including former Kinks frontman Ray Davies' 1985 musical
Return to Waterloo.
In 1990, Roth began to enjoy a limited amount of international attention, thanks to two starring roles, his acclaimed portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in
Robert Altman's
Vincent and Theo and a title role in the critically lauded film adaptation of
Tom Stoppard's
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Starring opposite
Gary Oldman, Roth made an impression on many a filmgoer, including
Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino cast Roth as undercover policeman Mr. Orange in his 1992 ensemble piece Resevoir Dogs, a film that allowed the actor to prove he could do an American accent and bleed to death convincingly. The success of Resevoir Dogs paved the way for more Hollywood work for Roth. In a drastic departure from his previous work, he next starred in the 1993 comedy Bodies, Rest & Motion alongside
Bridget Fonda,
Phoebe Cates, and
Eric Stoltz.
The following year, Roth returned to more familiar territory, as a hit man in
Little Odessa and as one of the robbers who catalyzes the action of Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction. After the enormous success of the latter film, the actor appeared the same year in the psychologically terrifying TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness alongside
John Malkovich, who played the unhinged Kurtz. After a disastrous third collaboration with Tarantino, the critically and commercially disemboweled
Four Rooms (1995), Roth had significantly greater success portraying an ominously prissy English nobleman in
Rob Roy, winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his work, along with a Golden Globe nomination and a British Academy Award.
Staying true to his habit of jumping from genre to genre, Roth next appeared as a convict with a jones for
Drew Barrymore in
Woody Allen's musical comedy
Everyone Says I Love You (1996) before playing a mobster in 1930s Harlem in
Hoodlum (1997). Roth remained in a down and dirty milieu for his next film,
Vondie Curtis-Hall's
Gridlock'd, which featured the actor, as well as
Thandie Newton and
Tupac Shakur, as modern-day heroin addicts. Although the film received critical praise, it failed to make a significant impression at the box office. Roth's subsequent films unfortunately suffered from similarly lackluster performances: 1998's
Liar went straight to video and the actor's film with
Cinema Paradiso director
Giuseppe Tornatore, La Leggenda del Pianista Sull'Oceano, remained mired in obscurity. However, Roth continued to keep busy with other projects, appearing in the 1998 Sundance entry Animals (And the Tollkeeper) and making his directing debut the same year with
The War Zone. Though it gained positive critical notice for its' downbeat story of a disfunctional family skidding towards oblivion, the subject matter found the film getting little exposure even though it won multiple film festival awards.
Roth's next turn as the menacing General Thade in
Tim Burton's
Planet of the Apes (2001) would be arguably his most mainstream, prolific and scenery-chewing role to date. As the sinister simian on an obsessive quest to kill
Mark Wahlberg's Capt. Leo Davis at any cost, Roth provided more than enough gusto to adequately fill the film's evil villian quota. While the film was a box-office hit, Roth opted to follow it up by returning to more obscure films. However, his visibility was raised considerably in 2004 by a pair of projects. First, he acted alongside the likes of Oscar-winners
Chris Cooper and
Richard Dreyfuss in director
John Sayles' highly-anticipated political film
Silver City and then showed up opposite
Jennifer Connelly and John C. Reilly in
Dark Water. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide