Ben Cross is a British actor of the stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of the British Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. He began acting at a very young age and participated in grammar school plays, most notably playing “Jesus” in a school pageant at age 12.
He was born Harry Bernard Cross on December 16, 1947 in London, England to a working class Irish Catholic family. His mother was a housekeeper and his father a doorman and nurse. Cross was educated at Devonport High School for Boys, a grammar school in the city of Plymouth in Devon, but was bullied by a teacher and left home at 15. As he left home, he worked various jobs, including work as a window washer, waiter and carpenter. He was master carpenter for the Welsh National Opera and property master at the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham, England.
In 1970 at the age of 22, he was accepted into London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) – the alma mater of actors such as John Gielgud, Glenda Jackson and Anthony Hopkins, but later expressed little interest in pursuing the classical route. Upon graduation from RADA, Ben performed in several stage plays at Duke’s Playhouse where he was seen in “Macbeth”, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. He then joined the Prospect Theatre Company and played roles in “Pericles”, “Twelfth Night”, and “Royal Hunt of the Sun”. Ben also joined the cast in the immensely popular musical “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and played leading roles in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”, “Mind Your Head” and the musical “Irma La Douce” — all at Leicester’s Haymarket Theatre.
Cross’s first big screen film appearance came in 1976 when he went on location to Deventer, Netherlands, to play Trooper Binns in Joseph E. Levine’s World War II epic A Bridge Too Far which starred an international cast, including Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Michael Caine and James Caan. Cross’s path to international stardom began in 1978 with his performance in the play Chicago in which he played Billy Flynn, the slick lawyer of murderess Roxie Hart.
Cross played Ikey Solomon in the Australian production The Potato Factory in 2000. In 2005, Cross, an anti-death penalty campaigner, starred as a death-row prisoner in Bruce Graham’s play, Coyote on a Fence, at the Duchess Theatre. He played Rudolf Hess in the 2006 BBC production Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial. In November 2007, Cross was cast in the role of Sarek, in the new Star Trek film directed and produced by J.J. Abrams
Cross is a director, writer and musician as well. He has written music, screenplays and articles for English language publications and has also written the lyrics for an album with “Bulgaria’s Frank Sinatra”, singer Vasil Petrov, which was released in late 2007. Among many of his original works is the musical Rage about Ruth Ellis, which was performed in various regional towns in the London area.
Cross has lived all over the world, including London, Los Angeles, New York, Southern Spain, Vienna, and, most recently, Sofia. He is familiar with the Spanish, Italian and German languages and enrolled in a course studying Bulgarian. He has been married twice: first to Penny, from 1977 to 1992, with whom he has two children named Lauren and Theodore; and then to Michelle until 2005.
Ben Cross Photo Gallery
