Ciarán Hinds

Ciarán Hinds ( ; born 9 February 1953) is an Irish actor. Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hinds is known for a range of screen and stage roles and has starred in feature films including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Persuasion (1995), Oscar and Lucinda (1997), Road to Perdition (2002), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Munich (2005), Amazing Grace (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Silence (2016), First Man (2018), and Belfast (2021), the last of which earned him nominations for Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Known for his distinctively deep voice, Hinds is also known for his voice role as Grand Pabbie, the Troll King in the animated film Frozen (2013) and its sequel Frozen II (2019). He played General Zakharow in Red Sparrow (2018). He also portrayed Steppenwolf in Zack Snyder's Justice League (2017) and its 2021 director's cut.

His television roles include Julius Caesar in the series Rome, DCI James Langton in Above Suspicion, Mance Rayder in Game of Thrones, and Captain Sir John Franklin in The Terror. In addition, Hinds appeared in season 3 of Shetland (2016), produced by ITV.

As a stage actor Hinds has spent periods with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, and six seasons with Glasgow Citizens' Theatre. Hinds has continued to work on stage throughout his career. In 2020, he was listed at number 31 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

Early life Ciarán Hinds was born on 9 February 1953 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Raised as a Catholic in north Belfast, he was one of five children and the only son of his doctor father, Gerry, and schoolteacher and amateur actress mother, Moya.

He was an Irish dancer in his youth and was educated at Holy Family Primary School and St Malachy's College. After leaving St Malachy's he attended the College of Business Studies before enrolling as a law student at Queen's University Belfast but was soon persuaded to pursue acting and abandoned his studies at Queen's to enrol at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, finishing in 1975.

Career

Hinds began his professional acting career at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre in a production of Cinderella (1976). He remained a frequent performer at the Citizens' Theatre during the late 1970s and through the mid-1980s. During this same period, Hinds also performed on stage in Ireland with the Abbey Theatre, the Field Day Theatre Company, the Druid Theatre, the Lyric Players' Theatre and at the Project Arts Centre. Hinds made his feature film debut in John Boorman's Excalibur in 1981. In 1987, he was cast by Peter Brook in The Mahabharata, a six-hour theatre piece that toured the world, and he also featured in its 1989 film version. Hinds almost missed the casting call in Paris due to difficulties renewing his Irish passport. In the early 1990s, he was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hinds was featured in two notable television docudramas: Granada Television's docudrama Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990) in which Hinds portrayed Richard McIlkenny, a Belfastman falsely imprisoned for an IRA bombing; and HBO's docudrama Hostages (1993), In the 2006 film Amazing Grace, Hinds returned to the stage later in 2009 with a role in Conor McPherson's play The Birds, which opened at Dublin's Gate Theatre in September 2009.

Hinds starred opposite Kelly Reilly in Above Suspicion, He reprised this role in Season 4, and in Season 5. On Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theater in New York, he was Big Daddy to Scarlett Johansson in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which began previews on 18 December 2012 and opened on 17 January 2013. In the summer of 2013, he performed at the Donmar Warehouse in London in the premiere production of The Night Alive, a play by Conor McPherson, which transferred in November 2013, with Hinds in the lead role, to the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. In 2015, he was in Hamlet alongside Benedict Cumberbatch at the London Barbican, playing King Claudius. He appeared the following year as Deputy Governor Danforth in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible alongside Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw. In 2018 he shot the film The Thin Man which has since been retitled The Man in the Hat in France directed by Oscar-winning composer Stephen Warbeck. thumb

In 2017, Hinds portrayed the DC Comics villain Steppenwolf in the superhero film Justice League. On 18 March 2021 Snyder's version, titled Zack Snyder's Justice League, was released on the WarnerMedia Entertainment streaming service HBO Max, restoring many scenes, including those of Hinds as Steppenwolf in the character's original design, which were not featured in the theatrical version.

In 2021, Hinds appeared as a drug trafficking gangster known as Eamon Cunningham, in the TV drama Kin. In October 2021, he was cast in the thriller film In the Land of Saints and Sinners, starring Liam Neeson and directed by Robert Lorenz.

Personal life Hinds lives in Paris and London with his wife, the French-Vietnamese actress Hélène Patarot. They met in 1987 while in the cast of Peter Brook's production of The Mahabharata. Their daughter, Aoife Hinds (born 1991, in London), is also an actress and has appeared in Derry Girls, Normal People, and Hellraiser.

Awards and nominations