Simon Jones (actor) - Life and Career

Life and Career

As well as The Hitchhiker's Guide, Jones also appeared in various other TV series, including Brideshead Revisited (in which he played the Earl of Brideshead --'Bridey'--, the heir to the Marquess of Marchmain), and the second series of Blackadder (playing Sir Walter Raleigh). His films have included Club Paradise, Privates on Parade, Miracle on 34th Street, Green Card, Griffin & Phoenix and The Devil's Own.

Simon studied at King's College, Taunton before he studied at Cambridge University where he was a member of the Footlights and he met Douglas Adams. This led to Jones being cast in Out of the Trees and later The Hitchhiker's Guide and the film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. In The Meaning of Life Jones had a minor role as one of the guests at the dinner party. He has also appeared in some of the solo film projects of the members of Monty Python: American Friends, Brazil and 12 Monkeys.

Jones has appeared in several Broadway plays, including The Real Thing, as Max (1985), Benefactors, as Colin (1985), Getting Married, as Reginald Bridgenorth (1991), Private Lives, as Elyot Chase (1992), The Real Inspector Hound, as Moon, and The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, as Hamlet, which played together in (1992), The School for Scandal, as Joseph Surface (1995), Ring Round the Moon, as Romainville (1999) and Waiting in the Wings, as Perry Lascoe (1999). In 2009 he played in Blithe Spirit, as Dr. Bradman, with Angela Lansbury and Rupert Everett. Off-Broadway he has a long list of credits, and was nominated for the 1990 Drama Desk Award Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for his role in Privates on Parade.

In Regional theatre at the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, Simon starred as Christopher Gore in the American premier of Brian Friel's The Home Place in late 2007. He returned there in late 2008 to portray C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands.

Jones is also a voice actor and audio book presenter, with more than 70 titles to his credit. Among them are:

• The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul for Simon and Schuster Audioworks for the US market
• Star Trek: Cacophony, playing Lt. Commander Stewart Mulligan in an original "Captain Sulu Adventures" audio programme, again for Simon and Schuster
• The Salmon of Doubt, for New Millennium Audio
• Douglas Adams at the BBC, for BBC Audio
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud: The Amulet of Samarkand, The Golem's Eye, Ptolemy's Gate, The Ring of Solomon
• A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullins, which won the Audio Publishers Association's 2006 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction.
• And Another Thing..., the sixth installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, written by Eoin Colfer.

In 2003, he reprised his role as Arthur Dent in a new radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The same year he was involved in the filming of the movie version of the first novel, making a brief cameo appearance in the role of the holographic Magrathean answering machine/automated defence system.

He was heard in 2009 as master detective Sexton Blake on BBC Radio 2 in the six-part series, The Adventures of Sexton Blake!.

In addition to his work as an actor, Simon Jones is also a co-artistic director at New York Off-Broadway company The Actors Company Theatre (TACT), where he played the role of Jack in the play Home by David Storey.

On 25 November 2009, Jones met his cousin Daniel Craig after Craig's performance on Broadway in A Steady Rain for the first time. Daniel Craig is the grandson of Simon's aunt.

Jones and his son Tim were hit by a car on 8 October 2010; though they suffered only bruises, he had to withdraw from the Actors Company Theater's production of Vaclav Havel’s Memorandum.