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from wikipedia

Biography

Early life

Dancy was born in Stoke-on-Trent, the son of eminent British philosopher Jonathan Dancy, a professor at the University of Reading and the University of Texas at Austin. His mother, Sarah, is a publisher. He has a brother, Jack, and a sister, Kate. Dancy was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Winchester College, and St Peter's College, Oxford. At the age of 18, he acted in the Winchester College Players production of Twelfth Night which was performed in both Winchester and at The Minack Theatre in Cornwall.

Career

Dancy's first small-screen appearances were in Trial & Retribution II, Dangerfield, The New Adventures of Robin Hood and Kavanagh QC. He is fluent in French, and played a Frenchman fascinated by knights in Relic Hunter. He played the lead in BBC's Daniel Deronda (2002) which was an adaptation of George Eliot's novel based on a young man learning about life, love and ultimately who he really is, Hallmark's David Copperfield (2000), and Danny in Cold Feet.

He has also modelled for Burberry since 2004. He has featured in three Burberry campaigns, alongside Kate Moss.

In July 2006, Dancy received a nomination for the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards, as Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries, for his role in Elizabeth I.

Dancy recently had a starring role on Broadway as Captain Dennis Stanhope in Journey's End at the Belasco Theatre. In 2008, Hugh is set to star as the dark poet Edgar Allan Poe in the film Poe, an animated feature. He'll also portray the character of Adam in the upcoming 2008 indie, Adam, a man stricken with Aspergers Syndrome.[1] Hugh will also be in Savage Grace and the film adaptation of Confessions of a Shopaholic. Hugh will grace the front cover of Vogue Hommes International Magazine for the Autumn/Winter 2008 edition (link needed).

Personal life

He is currently dating actress Claire Danes. In the February 14th, 2007 edition of New York Post in which he said, "I am, however, seeing Claire. And today I live in New York, downtown, which I love".[2] They met on the set of Evening. He also stated in a recent interview to Marie Claire magazine, "I met her then, but we didn’t start dating until filming finished." [3] His previous long term girlfriend was UK artist Annie Morris who illustrated good friend Sophie Dahl's book, "The Man With the Dancing Eyes."

Filmography

Year Film Role Notes

2009 Confessions of a Shopaholic Luke Brandon post-production

2008 Adam Adam post-production

Coach In Production, anticipated release date February 2009

2007 The Jane Austen Book Club Grigg Harris

Evening Buddy Wittenborn

Savage Grace Sam Green

Blood and Chocolate Aiden

2006 Elizabeth I Earl of Essex Television movie

Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction Adam Towers

2005 Shooting Dogs Joe Connor

2004 King Arthur Galahad

Ella Enchanted Prince Charmont

2003 Tempo Jack

The Sleeping Dictionary John Truscott

2002 Daniel Deronda Daniel Deronda Television movie

2001 Black Hawk Down Sfc. Kurt Schmid

Young Blades D'Artagnan

2000 David Copperfield David Copperfield Television movie

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TELEVISION

www.en.wikipedia.org

2000 David Copperfield (David Cooperfield)

2000 Madame Bovary (Leon)

2002 Daniel Deronda (Daniel Deronda)

2006 Elizabeth I (Earl of Essex) Nominated for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor

in a miniseries or movie

2011 The Big C (Lee)

2013 Hannibal (Will Graham)

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Hugh Dancy in NBC's 'Hannibal'

By Leah Rozen

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Hide the fava beans and Chianti. Hannibal Lecter is back, and he’s coming to your TV screen.

Hannibal, a new crime series from NBC, begins April 4 at 10 pm. It’s a prequel to The Silence of the Lambs and other films featuring novelist Thomas Harris’s terrifying creation, Hannibal Lecter, the shrink-turned-serial killer with a fondness for downing his victims at mealtime.

Rising British star Hugh Dancy plays Will Graham, a bright young criminal profiler working for the FBI. His mentor is none other than Dr. Hannibal Lecter; only we viewers know the bloody path the good doctor will eventually travel.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) plays this pre-Lambs version of Lecter, the role for which Welshman Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for best actor.

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Catching Up With Hugh Dancy

By Amy Amatangelo

April 5, 2013

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What’s it like to be friends with a serial killer when you don’t know he’s a serial killer? Hannibal Lecter took a bite out of the small screen with the premiere ofHannibal last night at 10 p.m. on NBC. Viewers met the infamous serial killer before Silence of the Lambs, when he was a successful psychiatrist employed by theFBI.

Hugh Dancy (The Big C, Adam, Hysteria) stars as Will Graham, a brilliant criminal profiler who is burdened with the ability to see events from a criminal’s perspective. In last night’s premiere, Will met Dr. Hannibal Lecter for the first time and the two struck up an unlikely bond. Paste talked to the British actor about his new series, what viewers can expect in the show’s first season and if Will will realize who Hannibal truly is.

Paste: This is your first regular series role. Why Hannibal?

Hugh Dancy: I was just intrigued by the script really and then by meeting with [executive producer] Bryan Fuller. Like the first installment of anything should, [the pilot script] raised a lot of questions and I wanted to know where he thought it was heading. I expected a vague answer perhaps. He gave me a fascinating and very full breakdown of not just how he saw the first season but literally the first four seasons of the show. It was intriguing. The way he saw the characters developing, particularly the interaction between me and Hannibal, the cat-and-mouse game between these two very unusual people. And I thought, “well if this were successful and we’re able to keep doing it, that’s going to keep me interested and excited for years to come.”

Paste: Will is rather tortured. He doesn’t take his responsibility lightly. Was that difficult to play over such a sustained amount of time?

Dancy: Hannibal is the one person Will is kind of playful with, almost light-hearted. That’s this odd relationship they strike up. Obviously I haven’t really grasped who I’m dealing with, but they instantly like each other because they operate on the same level. And, obviously, I’m working with great actors. So all of those things combine to mean I’m having a much better time than Will is.

Paste: How familiar were you with Hannibal Lecter before you began filming?

Dancy: I certainly seen Silence of the Lambs when it first came out, although it had been quite a while. What I hadn’t ever really done was read the [Thomas Harris] books—the original blueprint. That makes you feel more confident in having another stab at it like, in a way, a great play that people come back to again and again. You think, “Alright, we can do this with a sense of fealty to the original book and to Harris without trying to deliberately change anything just to make our own mark.” But also you can be free and creative with it, and hopefully people will go with that.

Paste: The characters on the show don’t know Hannibal is a killer, but the audience does. How will that play out over the course of the first season?

Dancy: 99.9 percent of people who sit down to watch this know more about Hannibal than the people on the show do. If we spend the entire season teasing out the idea, “Oh my God, Hannibal’s a killer,” well everybody watching the show is going to be ahead of you. What will be more surprising is the interest that Hannibal takes in my character and the light that shines on his warped version of humanity. He’s not the kind of killer who’s basically plotting to kill everyone that he meets. He’s not that kind of psychopath. He’s capable of taking interest in people. He can find people’s minds elegant, and when that happens, as is the case with me, he gets involved. That’s really what drives the series.

Paste: Can you say if, by the end of the season, Will and his colleagues will know who they are dealing with?

Dancy: By the time we come into season two the whole game changes. What you’re seeing in this season is mainly Will’s state of mind changing and, in some ways, deteriorating rapidly and Hannibal getting involved in that and to some extent kind of helping it along.

Paste: The series is very graphic, and there is quite a bit of violence. What are your thoughts on the level of violence in the show?

Dancy: There are definitely moments that you hope will shock people, but we don’t try to do that by racking up an enormous body count. If anything, I suppose, I think the show is set in this slightly alternative universe. Hannibal, as a character, is the monster that lurks in the back of all of our minds. That’s how I think about the violence on this show as well. It’s usually pretty heightened, and also there’s a cost to it for Will. He’s a guy who is dragged into this world because he’s very adept at walking in the shoes of very violent people. He has a kind of duty to do that because he can catch them, but it’s not something he enjoys and it weighs on him very heavily. And I think in the sense what violence there is drives the understanding of the characters rather than just being there for titillation. Like a lot of people, I have mixed feelings about some of the violence in popular culture, and when it’s just thrown in because it’s a cheap way to tell the story then I just tune off. I think you have to know what Hannibal is capable of to know what kind of world Will is living in and to understand who they are. But the ultimate goal of the show is to freak you out more because of these people’s minds than any particular crime scene that you’re going to see.

Paste: Why do you think we, as a viewing audience, are so fascinated by serial killers and their crimes?

Dancy: We’ve always been a bit fascinated by the idea of a motiveless killer, somebody who is doing awful things but bottom line can’t really quite say why they’re doing them, and they seem to be having more fun than everybody else.

Paste: Your wife Claire Danes stars in Showtime’s Homeland. Any chance we will see you guest star on each other’s shows?

Dancy: I don’t know that we’d be able to really. I think each of us on our own shows is plenty to be dealing with.

Paste: Your baby [son Cyrus] was born in December. Are you getting any sleep these days with a newborn in the house?

Dancy: We get like the kind of funny interrupted bouts of sleep at weird hours, but that’s kind of like making a TV show, so we’ve had a bit of practice.

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Hugh Dancy: 'Darling, Don't Tell Me What You Did Today.'

By Gerard Gilbert

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Like any follower of the American series Homeland, British actor Hugh Dancy was eager to avoid advance storyline information that might spoil his enjoyment of the show.

Unlike other fans of the Homeland, however, he happens to be married to Claire Danes, who plays the drama's CIA heroine Carrie Mathison. The couple, who met while making the film Evening in 2007, have been man and wife since 2009, and live together in New York City with their four-month-old son Cyrus.

"Like everybody else I got so hooked on the first series of Homeland," says Dancy. "So I did say to Claire 'look, stop telling me about it'. Terrible policy for a marriage… 'Please don't tell me what you did today' is not a good line… so we gave up on that. Now I read the scripts as they come out."

Dancy, along with Danes and baby Cyrus, is briefly in his own homeland, the UK, "seeing family in a military, organised, slightly imperfect way", and also promoting his new TV show, Hannibal, the television spin-off featuring everybody's favourite serial killer, Dr Hannibal Lecter – here played by Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale).

Based on Thomas Harris's source novels, specifically Red Dragon (the only one to feature Dancy's character, FBI agent profiler Will Graham), the 13-part drama series is the brainchild of Bryan Fuller, who created NBC's Heroes. Hannibal is a prequel to all those Lecter movies starring Anthony Hopkins (and the one, Michael Mann's 1986 adaptation Manhunter, featuring Brian Cox), and here Lecter is still at liberty, a well-respected psychiatrist whose crimes have yet to be uncovered. Indeed, at this stage, there is a mutual admiration between Graham and Lecter.

Fuller describes it as "a kind of love story". "There is a cheery disposition to our Hannibal," he says. "He's not being telegraphed as a villain. If the audience didn't know who he was, they wouldn't see him coming. What we have is Alfred Hitchcock's principle of suspense – show the audience the bomb under the table and let them sweat when it's going to boom."

Hannibal is an unusual series on several counts, not just because each episode has a gastronomic title, such as "Amuse-Bouche", "Entrée" and "Buffet Froid", or that the production employed Spanish chef José Andrés, who trained under Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, as "culinary cannibal consultant", advising the crew on the proper procedure for preparing human organs for consumption.

As that visceral job title suggests, this is a dark, dark show ("Elementary meets Dexter" is how one critic put it) – and one's first suspicion, since it's being made by an American network, NBC, rather than a more permissive cable channel, would be that the whole grisly serial-killer element would be watered down. Not so, and there's one scene involving victims and mushrooms that might put you off eating fungi for life.

"Better minds than my own have explained how unlikely it was that they [NBC] would leave us alone as much as they did," says Dancy. "That wasn't my anxiety. I never worry about the specifics of American network TV versus cable, but, yuh, it was amazing that it sustains the darkness of its premise."

Add to the mix Gillian Anderson – in her first North American TV series since The X-Files (with the interesting task of being Lecter's psychiatrist) and a guest turn by Eddie Izzard as a cellmate of Lecter's, the so-called Chesapeake Ripper, and it's clear that Hannibal isn't the usual formulaic, corporate advertiser-friendly network fare.

In fact, with echoes of Stanley Kubrick's banning of A Clockwork Orange in the UK, the only censorship so far was ordered by Fuller himself, who pulled the fourth episode in the States because of sensitivities towards the Boston Marathon bombing. Fuller says of the episode, which involves a character "brainwashing kids so that they kill other kids", that "it was the association that came with the subject matter… It was my own sensitivity."

So far, four out 13 episodes have aired in America, to widespread critical approval. "I do my best not to read reviews, although, that said, it all filters through," says Dancy. "The four friends I watched it with liked it very much. But they're my friends."

Raised with a younger brother and sister in Newcastle-under-Lyme by his father, Jonathan, a moral philosopher, and mother Sarah, who works in academic publishing, Dancy, 37, was educated at Winchester public school – where he first acquired a taste for acting – and Oxford, where he studied English. Given his background, obvious intelligence and great hair, there were frequent early allusions to Dancy being "the new Hugh Grant", an epithet he has managed to rise above. "Listen, there are worse things to be told," he says. "I've found regardless of what you're doing or where you are, you'll be compared to somebody."

Maybe so, but his is already shaping up to be an unusual career. Dancy's early television work majored in costume drama – he took the title roles in a 2000 TV movie of David Copperfield, in BBC1's 2002 adaptation of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and gave an Emmy-nominated performance opposite Helen Mirren, playing the Earl of Essex in Channel 4's Elizabeth I (2005). Since then however it has moved in a less predictable direction. Despite some wrong turns (the feeble 2009 romcom Confessions of a Shopaholic, for example, or the ill-advised 2006 sequel, Basic Instinct 2), Dancy has made a mark in a diverse range of independent movies.

He played a man with Asperger syndrome in the award-winning Adam, the Victorian inventor of the vibrator in the uneasily pitched period drama Hysteria and (perhaps his most sophisticated performance to date) as cult escapee Elizabeth Olsen's impatient yuppie brother-in-law in Martha Marcy May Marlene. And on stage, he won glowing reviews opposite Nina Arianda in the acclaimed Broadway production of the David Ives kinky two-hander Venus in Fur.

"I guess I've pursued my own interests and tried to be broad-minded," says Dancy, who has in the past stated that he wasn't interested in a conventional Hollywood A-list career. "Yes, I think that's a dangerous statement to make", he says now, somewhat ruefully. "I guess what I meant by that – because obviously you do want to play the lead roles – is that I'm also drawn to things that wouldn't fit that description." And when I mention Benedict Cumberbatch telling me about his desire for a big fat Hollywood pay cheque, Dancy adds: "I think it's refreshingly honest for a British actor actually to say that. Great – good for him – and I guess I want all those things as well, but I guess I just don't want it exclusively."

A sure-fire box-office draw would be to appear opposite his wife, something the couple have assiduously avoided since becoming an item. "It's not a positive rule but I'm pretty picky and so is Claire and we have fairly stringent rules about what we do," he says. "That would be doubly so (if we acted together) because if we did it, we would get attention for that reason. All the more reason to avoid screwing up basically.

"And anyway, both in terms of the way something would be marketed, but also in the way you would approach it as an actor, you wouldn't want to lean on your real-life relationship. Even worse would be if you were on screen or on stage and there was a kind of 'well, we can access an easy intimacy because we live with each other'… that's going to be dangerous for your relationship and dangerous for your acting."

Not that there's going to be much time for acting together. Hannibal shoots for six months of the year in Toronto, while Homeland films for the other half of the year in North Carolina. How does Dancy feel about the possibility of potentially tying up his career for the next seven years? "It was a big deal for me to sit down with Bryan, having read the first episode, and ask him 'Why would I sign my life away to you?' He's one of life's great enthusiasts and he launched into a description of this whole series. And then he gave me the next series, then the third and fourth – he described about five years of television and he clearly had a vision, which is not always the case."

And that still leaves the other six months. Dancy says he'd like to devote time to baby Cyrus, and do some theatre in London, where he still keeps a flat (currently rented out to his sister). His accent remains public-school, with no hint of transatlantic. How is his American accent? "It doesn't wobble back out into English any more. Although when I did Venus in Fur and Mike Nichols (the Broadway and movie director of The Graduate and much else) came to see it, he only came backstage to correct my pronunciation of the word 'issue'. But when it's Mike Nichols you take the note."

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'Hannibal' review: Hugh Dancy and killer visuals

power NBC's new drama

By Rick Porter

April 4, 2013

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NBC's "Hannibal" is a beautifully executed television show. It's anchored by several great performances, and it's among the more distinctive and gorgeously filmed shows on the air right now.

And I'm not sure I can watch it beyond the five episodes NBC sent out for review. More on that in a few paragraphs. First, though, the "beautifully executed" part.

"Hannibal," which premieres Thursday (April 4), is a prequel of sorts to "Red Dragon," Thomas Harris' first novel featuring Dr. Hannibal Lecter (although the show is set in the present). It centers on the doctor's (Mads Mikkelsen, "Casino Royale") relationship with Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), an FBI consultant with an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of serial killers. Will's empathy has taken a heavy toll on his mental state, but a new and particularly disturbing case brings him back into the field at the behest of Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), the head of the bureau's Behavioral Sciences Unit.

Crawford also enlists Lecter to help with the case, but mostly to keep an eye on Will and make sure he stays stable. We, of course, know that Lecter is himself a killer, but as far as anyone on screen knows at the moment, he's just another brilliant mind helping out the FBI.

Dancy ("The Big C") and Mikkelsen are both superb in their roles. As Dancy plays him, Graham is a jangly, jumpy bundle of neuroses, prone to vivid dreams about his subjects and doubts about his own worth to the FBI. You can virtually feel him trying, not always successfully, to hold himself together. Mikkelsen, meanwhile, is the picture of calm, never raising his voice or making a rash move, even though you can tell his mind is a step or two ahead of everyone else's. Fishburne, too, raises Jack Crawford a couple steps above the typical crime-show authority figure.

(It's not easy, incidentally, to divorce Hannibal Lecter from Anthony Hopkins, who played him so indelibly in three movies. It may take a bit for fans of "Silence of the Lambs" et al to get used to Mikkelsen's read on the character, but his performance is very strong in its own right.)

Creator Bryan Fuller and his team also deliver one of the richest visual experiences you'll see. "Hannibal" is pretty much the opposite of Fuller's "Pushing Daisies" in tone and in subject matter, but his flair for a great image remains. Red is everywhere in "Hannibal," but for the most part it's not lurid, jump-off-the-screen crimson, and there's a twilight, late-winter quality to the light in many scenes that fits the brooding tone perfectly.

So why, after praising the show for several hundred words, would I decide not to watch a gorgeous-looking, intriguing, well-made show? It has to do in part with the violence in "Hannibal," and in part with the larger world of pop culture, and in part with personal things.

No one would expect a show about Hannibal Lecter not to contain some violence, and "Hannibal" does indeed deliver, often in baroque fashion: bodies impaled, bodies flayed, bodies used as mushroom incubators. To its credit, though, "Hannibal" is as much about the effect seeing that much death has on Will as it is about the killings themselves.

Violent images have never made me physically squeamish, and they still don't. That's not where my unease lies. Nor does it lie in the idea that depictions of violence in media can cause or influence real-world violence -- I don't think it's that simple.

What did turn me off a bit in the first couple episodes of "Hannibal" was the victims were all young women. That is of course a well-worn trope in everything from crime dramas to slasher movies, but it's one I've become hyper-aware of since becoming the father of a girl a year ago. The subtext in these episodes, or in any number of "Criminal Minds" episodes or "The Following" or "Last House on the Left," is that the life of a young woman is cheap, and that's not a message I want my daughter to take in as she grows up.

That's obviously a very personal thing, and I recognize it has little to do with how well "Hannibal" is made or how anyone reading this review might respond to the show. But it is how I responded to the show, as otherwise interesting as it may be.

"Hannibal" airs at 10 p.m. ET Thursday on NBC.

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