Oliver Cotton

Oliver Cotton is an English actor and playwright who trained at the Drama Centre in London. He worked extensively at the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier, taking leading roles in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Peter Brook's Oedipus. Other stage work includes the Royal Court, where he played leads in The Duchess of Malfi and Edward Bond's Lear, and he helped found Joint Stock, appearing in its first production The Speakers. On television he became best known as Cesare Borgia in the BBC's 1981 series The Borgias, and he also had roles in Sharpe's Battle and Poirot. In film, he has been seen in Oliver Twist (1982), Firefox (1982), and Eleni (1985), and he later took roles in The Sicilian (1987) and Shanghai Knights (2003). He has also written stage plays such as Scrabble for the National Theatre and Daytona.