Anthony Howell

Howell was born in the Lake District. He trained to be an actor at the Drama Centre in North London. His acting debut came when he began a world tour with Robert Lepage's stage play The Geometry of Miracles. He subsequently starred in the BBC four-part series Wives and Daughters (1999) before joining the 2000 Royal Shakespeare Company season in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where he took leading roles in the three main plays of that year: Orlando in As You Like It, Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet and Antipholous of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, playing opposite David Tennant.

After leaving the RSC in 2001 he filmed three TV series; Ultimate Force, Helen West and the first season of Foyle's War. He went on to spend more than ten years in Foyle's War, working alongside Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks.

During the months he wasn't filming Foyle's War he returned to the theatre. In 2005 he starred in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None in the West End of London. He played the lead in the first stage adaptation of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman which toured the UK in 2006. In 2008, Howell appeared in the Primavera production of Jingo: A Farce of War by Charles Wood at London's Finborough Theatre, then toured with the Peter Hall company in an adaptation of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and Ibsen's A Doll's House.

In 2010 he played Gordon Way in the BBC TV adaptation of Dirk Gently, loosely based on the books by Douglas Adams. Later that year he joined Shakespeare's Globe to perform in Henry VIII, and also in the world premiere of Howard Brenton's Anne Boleyn, playing the role of a young Henry VIII opposite Miranda Raison as Anne, roles they both reprised at the Globe in the following year.

Two years later he played Trigorin in a new adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull by Evening Standard Award winning writer, Anya Reiss at the Southwark Playhouse.

He also played Jean Neuhaus, a Belgian chocolatier, in an episode in Season 2 of Mr Selfridge.

Howell filmed Dracula in Budapest, an NBC Universal series starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He also voices Victor Belmont in the 2014 video game Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, as well as providing the motion capture for the protagonist, Dracula. He also provided the voice and motion capture for Weyland-Yutani employee Christopher Samuels in the 2014 survival horror game, Alien: Isolation.

In the summer seasons of 2014 and 2015 he appeared on the stage of the Globe in London, in 2014 as Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and in 2015 as Bishop Santa Cruz in Helen Edmundson's The Heresy of Love.

In 2017 he played Cliff in the horror film Widow's Walk.

In 2018 BBC Radio 4 aired a five-part drama, The Unforgiven. Set in 1984, this was a prequel to the BBC One television series Waking the Dead, which ran from 2000 to 2011. The Unforgiven was written by Barbara Machin, the creator of Waking the Dead, and features the original cast, the exception being Trevor Eve, who played Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd in the TV series, but was replaced by Howell for the radio series.