Welcome to RichardArmitageOnline.comThis is an unofficial website about the work of the British actor Richard Armitage, star of BBC Spooks, Robin Hood, North and South and The Vicar of Dibley.
There's information here about his television, film and theatre work, including pictures and video clips of many of his TV and film roles. You can also read his comments about his characters, taken from published interviews. Navigate to any of his roles from the menu at the top of the page, or go to the Television Career, Film Career, Theatre Career or Voice Career pages and follow the links from there. Also see... - Latest News (below)
This site is an Amazon.co.uk Associate and a BookDepository.co.uk Affiliate, and all commission earned from sales referred from the site will be donated to charity. If you follow any of the links on this site to Richard Armitage's DVDs or audiobooks at Amazon UK I hope you enjoy looking around and will visit again soon. Annette
Nb Richard's four JustGiving pages are as follows: Childline, Barnardos, Shelter, and the Salvation Army.
Latest News
New cast members for Spooks The Daily Mail today confirms recent rumours that Sophia Myles and Max Brown are joining the cast of Spooks for its ninth series, currently being filmed in London. Sophia Myles was recently seen filming with Richard Armitage. They worked together in The Four Alice Bakers at the Birmingham Rep in 1999.
Award nomination for The Great Sperm Race This documentary about human conception which was narrated by Richard Armitage was nominated for a Royal Television Society award in the Science & Natural History category. However, at the award ceremony on 16th March in London, the winner in this category was Inside Nature's Giants, a four part series for Channel 4. Ordeal by Innocence in Japan The episode of Miss Marple in which Richard Armitage was a guest star, Ordeal by Innocence, will be broadcast on the Japanese channel, BS2, on Wednesday 24th March at 20:00.
Reviews of Clarissa Writing in The Guardian (15th March), Elisabeth Mahoney praised Clarissa, saying that it was "everything you could possibly want from Sunday afternoon radio drama. Hattie Naylor's terrifically fresh and crisp adaptation brings Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel to irresistible life." She went on to commend the performances as "flawless", and said that "the plot rips along with plenty of drama, piquantly drawn characters and exquisitely funny moments." In an article in the Daily Telegraph (15th March) about the BBC's plans to downgrade drama on its national radio stations, Gillian Reynolds pointed to Clarissa as an example of the best of radio drama. "Clarissa, Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century novel where characters and plot emerge through the writing of letters, may be a landmark in literature but it’s not the most gripping of reads. In Hattie Naylor’s lively adaptation as Radio 4’s new Sunday afternoon Classic Serial and in Marilyn Imrie’s bold and thoughtful production it positively crackles. [...] I recommend it highly" Previews were also complimentary. The Radio Times (13-19th March) recommended Clarissa as one of Sunday's Choices of the day, praising Naylor's "astute cutting back of Samuel Richardson's huge epistolary novel". Will Hodgkinson in The Guardian (13th March) said that it was "an excellent adaptation, with Richard Armitage playing the libertine while Zoe Waites brings restrained dignity to the role of Clarissa." In The Observer (14th March) Stephanie Billen said, "Published in 1747, Samuel Richardson's forward-thinking novel about a young woman's desperate struggle for liberty is successfully adapted in four parts by Hattie Naylor. At first all is rosy for beautiful Clarissa (Zoe Waites), but the arrival of a tireless suitor, the rakish Lovelace (Richard Armitage), spells disaster after her family rejects him and plot to marry her off to the repellent Mr Solmes, who thinks 'terror and fear look pretty in a young bride'. " The Sunday Times (14th March) chose it as the radio Pick of the Day, Paul Donovan saying, "Richard Armitage is best known as dark medieval hunk Guy of Gisbourne in Robin Hood and the 19th-century mill owner in North and South, both BBC1. Now he radiates menace on radio as the rapist and libertine Robert Lovelace in a pacy, gripping, vibrant four-part serialisation of Samuel Richardson's 1747 novel. Zoe Waites is sexy and sympathetic in the title role." And the Telegraph chose it as one of its iPlayer choices for the day. Episode 2 is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 21st March at 3pm, GMT. Those outside the UK can listen to the broadcast live on the Internet from the Radio 4 website's 'Listen Live' service. Each episode will also be available on the BBC iPlayer for at least seven days after broadcast - unlike television programmes, which are only available to those within the UK, radio programmes on iPlayer are available anywhere. The Classic Serial page contains links to the episodes available on iPlayer, and also has a link to Listen Live (top right).
Too Poor for Posh School? Richard Armitage was the narrator for a documentary in the Cutting Edge strand on Channel 4 on Thursday 11th March. Too Poor for Posh School? follows the selection procedure as a group of boys compete for a scholarship to Harrow School. An extract can be seen on You Tube. Viewers in the UK can see the entire programme on 4OD, until 9th April. The programme will be shown in Wales on S4C, on Monday 15th March at 10.55pm.
The four part serial begins on Sunday 14th March at 3pm, repeated on Saturday 20th March at 9pm. Radio 4 has broadcast three trailers for the series, and Richard features in all of them (Listen to trailer 1, trailer 2, trailer 3) He plays the villain of the piece, the libertine Robert Lovelace. The heroine is Clarissa Howe, whose rising and ambitious family tries to force her into a loveless marriage to improve their fortunes. But she escapes by eloping with Lovelace, whose intentions are far from honourable. There follows a battle of wills between the two, which ends in tragedy. Hattie Naylor has adapted the novel for Radio 4's Classic Serial strand, which over the years has broadcast dramatisations of many classic novels with impressive casts. The cast for Clarissa includes Zoe Waites as Clarissa, Alison Steadman, Deborah Findlay, Miriam Margolyes, Julian Rhind-Tutt, and Sophie Thompson. Some excerpts from the first episode can be heard on the Clarissa Excerpts page. More information about the adaptation...
The Convenient Marriage Amazon UK Charlie film Producer Mike Ogden has announced that because of scheduling problems, Richard Armitage is no longer attached to his film, Charlie. Ordeal by Innocence repeat The episode of Miss Marple in which Richard Armitage was a guest star, Ordeal by Innocence, is to be repeated in the UK. It'll be shown on ITV3 on Wednesday 17th March at 7.55pm.
An excerpt from the programme can be seen on the Forest Elephants page. There are also eleven short excerpts on the BBC's Natural World page, where the whole programme can be seen on the BBC iPlayer for a week after broadcast (only for those in the UK). The subject of the documentary is the work of American scientist Andrea Turkalo, who has been studying a group of forest elephants in the Central African Republic for 20 years. In collaboration with scientists at Cornell University's Elephant Listening Project, she has been unravelling the 'language' that the elephants use to communciate with each other. Many of the sounds they make are at such low frequencies that the human ear cannot hear them. The analysis of their communications is shedding new light on the complex social lives of forest elephants.
New Santander advert Another advertisement for Santander, voiced by Richard Armitage, is now running on British television. Also featuring the giant red Lego which is the theme of this campaign, it advertises Santander's Flexible ISA.
He describes the way he approaches the reading of audiobooks, how he creates the voices for the characters and the challenges of recording Georgette Heyer's novels. "I'd like to strangle her for writing these incredibly long sentence constructions!" he says. "But actually, that's part of the fun of it because we speak in such short soundbites these days, everything is so short and immediate that when you're faced with a sentence which is really a paragraph long, and you have to drive the thought through and keep the idea and syntax all in the right place, I find that frustrating but really challenging and when you get it right and you hit it, it's really satisfying." He also talks about what he likes to read, although he admits that he usually reads books that relate to his current work and has to set aside his own personal tastes. He hints that there may be another series of Strike Back, the drama series for Sky that's due to be broadcast later in the spring, and says that there is increasing interest in his Richard III project. Venetia, the second of Richard's recordings of Georgette Heyer for Naxos Audiobooks, is released on 1st April, but many copies have already been sent out. It can be ordered at Amazon UK More information about this audiobook...
Spooks 9 begins filming Reports last month that filming has now commenced on series 9 of Spooks have been confirmed on Richard Armitage's page on the United Agents website. The series is due to be broadcast in the autumn on BBC One, and filming is taking place in and around London. At least two new cast members, yet to be officially announced, are joining the show. Alfa Romeo advert The new UK television advertisement for the Alfa Romeo Mito MultiAir is voiced by Richard Armitage. There's also a radio advertisement.
During the week leading up to the start of the Games, several trailers voiced by him were heard across the BBC's network of radio stations. Each featured a different winter sport: ski-jumping, skeleton bob and snowboarding. He also provided the voiceover for a trailer which ran on BBC television in the same week. Two more adverts ran on BBC television during the Games. One was for the BBC website's coverage of the Olympics and the other advertised the news and information available to mobile phone users. In addition, there were occasional five second trailers informing viewers that a live Olympics programme was coming - for example, "In half an hour", or "Next". And more radio trailers told listeners how they could follow the Olympics on the BBC. Two versions were broadcast, each mentioning different sports - the first featured skiing, skeleton bob and bobsleigh, while the second featured ski-jumping, figure skating and ice hockey.
George Gently DVD in The Netherlands A region 2 DVD of the first series of George Gently (which includes the pilot episode, in which Richard Armitage appeared) has been released - it's in English with Dutch subtitles. The pilot episode was first broadcast in The Netherlands in January, and was very well received, being the eighth most-watched programme of the day. The DVD can be ordered at BOL, among other places. Richard Armitage at Sky Showcase Richard Armitage was one of the guests at an event held recently in London by Sky, to showcase their new programming for 2010. OK magazine reported on it. He will star in one of their new dramas this spring, Strike Back.
Spooks 9 to be the last series? The Daily Mail (20th January) reports that among the drama series to be axed by the BBC will be Spooks. However, the BBC has denied this, saying that Spooks will return for a ninth series in the autumn, and that there are no plans to cancel it. It was recently reported that the BBC's controller of drama commissioning, Ben Stephenson, was intending to kill off a number of long-running drama series to make way for new ones. Although there has been much speculation in the British press about which series might go, there has been no official announcement so far.
The Spanish bank took over two British banks, Abbey and Bradford & Bingley, some time ago, but in an advertising campaign beginning on 11th January, both of them are being rebranded under the Santander name. An article on The Guardian's website gives more information about the new campaign, which features British world champion racing driver Lewis Hamilton.
Robin Hood series 3 DVD in North America The region 1 DVD of season 3 has now been released, and can be ordered at Amazon USA and the BBC America shop. Writing for Spooks On BBC Radio 4's Front Row on 18th December, Mark Lawson interviewed two of the writers on Spooks, Ben Richards and Richard McBrien, and mentioned that Spooks has been recommissioned for a ninth series. (Front Row is Radio 4's daily review of arts and culture.) The discussion about writing for Spooks was an interesting one, and can be heard about half way through the programme on the BBC iPlayer. Strike Back in FHM The February edition of FHM magazine carried a short article about the filming of Strike Back in the Kalahari desert. Working in the 40 degree heat was like "being in a pizza oven", said Richard Armitage.
Article about Strike Back filming Sky magazine had a short feature about the filming of Strike Back in its January 2010 issue (available to Sky subscribers only). It reported that filming in the Green Kalahari desert last autumn was briefly halted when a snake was spotted nearby. Strike Back promo Sky has been showing a brief promo for Strike Back. A copy of it can be seen on You Tube. Spooks series 8 ends The last episode of the series was broadcast on 23rd December. The Guardian's Sam Wollaston reviewed it (but beware spoilers). The viewing figures were strong - 5.46 million, a 23.3% share. This was the second highest audience of the series.
Richard Armitage plays John Porter (right) in an adaptation of Chris Ryan's novel of the same name. Porter is a discharged veteran who led a special forces unit on a daring hostage rescue into the heart of Basra on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But things went disastrously wrong, and Porter has been haunted by guilt for the last seven years. Then he is given the opportunity to return to Iraq and redeem himself. Set in Iraq, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan, the six part series was filmed in South Africa over the last few months. It reunites Richard with a former cast member from Robin Hood, Toby Stephens. Also in the cast are Andrew Lincoln, Ewen Bremner, Jodhi May, Dhaffer L'Abidine, Orla Brady and Colin Salmon.
Strike Back filming The October 2009 edition of Screen Africa magazine carried a report on the filming of Strike Back. A news item on page 1 (cont'd page 47) reported that the series started filming in September in and around Johannesburg and would continue until December. In the same edition, an advertorial for Kodak (on page 15) discussed the producer Andrew Benson's decision to shoot the series on 35mm film, rather than Digital HD which had been the original intention. Director of Photography Steve Lawes explained, "Firstly I think you can get some very interesting results on digital, but I feel it has an inherent electronic look. Secondly, the running performance of it. It doesn’t have the latitude of film, the whole way that you work on it - the back up etc. - yes the work flow can work, but my over riding argument is that if you are going to come to South Africa and shoot and where you have the kind of light that is available here, you want to capitalise on it. The way I always feel about digital - any digital camera - is it simply takes me longer to get the same aesthetic on any format other than film".
Forthcoming workBeginning on 14th March, Richard Armitage can be heard as Lovelace in BBC Radio 4's dramatisation of Samuel Richardson's 18th century epistolary novel, Clarissa. In autumn 2009, Richard filmed Strike Back in South Africa. It's a 6 part TV series based on Chris Ryan's novel of the same name. It's due for transmission in April 2010. Also in April, Naxos Audiobooks will release his abridged recording of Georgette Heyer's novel, Venetia. In the autumn, he will return as Lucas North in the ninth series of Spooks for the BBC. Filming has now started in London.
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is showing another Georgette Heyer audiobook read by Richard Armitage, The Convenient Marriage. It's due for release on 2nd August, and can already be pre-ordered. 
Venetia - excerpt and interview The 
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Strike Back The