Career
Threlfall graduated from the Manchester Metropolitan School of Theatre. He has notched up a wide range of film and television credits since his 1977 acting debut in the Play for Today version of the film Scum as the eloquent Archer. Television appearances include Trevor in Mike Leigh's 1977 made-for-TV film Kiss of Death, Leslie Titmuss in Paradise Postponed, Edgar in the 1984 Granada Television production of King Lear opposite Laurence Olivier in the title role. He also had regular roles in the situation comedies Nightingales and Men of the World, and guest appearances in dramas such as Cutting It, The Knock, CI5: The New Professionals and Spooks. He played Prince Charles in Diana: Her True Story in 1993 and his father Prince Philip in the 2005 drama The Queen's Sister. David currently plays the key character of Frank Gallagher in Paul Abbott's Shameless. Shown on Channel 4 since its first series in 2003, the ongoing show about the residents of a fictional Manchester housing estate is now in its tenth series, shown in 2012.
He also played the role of Friedrich Kritzinger in the BBC/HBO drama Conspiracy, a dramatisation of the infamous Wannsee Conference. In 2006, he played the domineering husband of wartime diarist Nella Last, in the TV drama Housewife, 49. Film credits include John le Carré's The Russia House, Patriot Games, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, alongside Cate Blanchett, and Nowhere Boy in which he took the part of John Lennon's Uncle George.
He also had a small role in the 2006 film Alien Autopsy and played the character Martin Blower in the 2007 film Hot Fuzz, acting alongside Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. He recently starred in an episode of The Whistle Blowers. He starred as the lead role in the fourth episode of the BBC Documentary-Drama series Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire as the Emperor Constantine I.
He voiced the detective Paolo Baldi in BBC Radio 4's Baldi. He also read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness for a radio adaptation. In 1980, he played Smike in the eight-hour stage version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company in both London and New York.
Other notable stage performances include Riddley Walker, Oedipus, Macbeth and Peer Gynt at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, Bolingbroke in Richard II and Orgon in Tartuffe at the National Theatre in London. Threlfall played Jack in When the Whales Came (1989), opposite Paul Scofield and Helen Mirren. In 2010, he appeared as a guest on Have I Got News for You.
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