A History Of Liverpool Thespians - Doug Bradley

Douglas William Bradley was born in Liverpool on the 7th of September 1954 and attended Quarry Bank High School. He got his first urge to go into acting in the early 1960s, when he remembers going to the Empire Theatre with his family for their annual Pantomime visit. That particular year, it featured, two names which would be very familiar to British audiences but not so much to American audiences – Norman Wisdom and Bruce Forsyth. At one point, they were playing a game of cricket with bags of candies. One of them was tossing the bags across the stage and the other was batting them out into the audience for the children to catch. He remembers sitting watching this, thinking it looked like the best thing in the world to possibly be doing, and he had a fundamental urge to want to be where they were and do what they were doing in that specific moment. Acting was always around with school plays and so forth and he first met Clive Barker while they were doing the school play together at Quarry Bank and started to get involved working with him there and then later doing independent experimental theatre in Liverpool and eventually in London. It was something that was always there and ultimately, he thinks, it was the only thing he was ever really good at. It was the thing that he knew always made him the happiest.

Pinhead

 

Never going to theatre school and never having taken an acting lesson in his life he just knew this was the thing he was going to be doing by the time he was in his mid-twenties. Maintaining his friendship with Clive Barker, in the 1970s they founded the progressive theatre group 'Dog Company'. While Clive, who had who studied English and Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, worked on writing with his friend Peter Atkins (script-writer for several Hellraiser films), Doug started acting first performing under Clive's direction as King Herod in the short film 'Salome' (1973). This was followed by another short horror film 'Forbidden' (1978), again directed by Clive. Doug then took his first step in making it to the Movie Monster Hall Of Fame with his role as the cenobite, Pinhead, who he portrayed in the first of Clive Barker's eight 'Hellraiser' movies in 1987. The idea of the movie had started to come together the previous year but Doug's character was anonymous in the first film. After collaborating together for over a decade, his small bit-part in this low-budget film, just ten minutes of screen time, was enough to turn Doug into a horror icon. As they say, the rest is history. The film 'Hellbound: Hellraiser11' followed in 1989 in which he was now the star as Pinhead, with Hellraiser becoming a full-blown franchise, with Doug playing Pinhead in eight of the eleven films. This iconic, and visually stunning role, is one that easily crowns his career, although he also played the separate role of Captain Elliot Spencer in two of the 'Hellraiser' films, in 1988 and 1992. He has also starred in several horror shorts. Doug has also appeared in many short horror films, such as 'Red Lines' and 'On Edge' and is a member of the UK animation company Renga Media, makers of the independent Dominator films and shorts, dividing job roles between producer and voice actor. Of these, the 1999 U.K. effort 'On Edge' got the most attention, winning awards several years later at a number of American indie film festivals. After a final 'Hellraiser' straight-to-video entry in 2005, he has remained busy with roles in various feature films. Among these was the 2011 Nazi horror zombie offering 'The 4th Reich', based on a grassroots 2007 U.K. short, 'The Soldier', which found original success via the Internet. Due to his eventual skill at application and removal of the Pinhead appliances and costume, he has been credited in some of the 'Hellraiser' films as an assistant make-up artist named Bill Bradley, using his middle name. After his roles in the 'Hellraiser' films and the 1990 horror film 'Nightbreed', 2006 saw Doug star in 'Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes' and 2008 saw him once again returning to Clive Barker's cinematic universe by way of a featured appearance in 'Book of Blood'.  As a voice actor he has performed narrations on several songs by the extreme metal band 'Cradle of Filth'. He also appeared on 'Swansong for a Raven' and 'Satyriasis' from the band's 2004 album, 'Nymphetamine' and has contributed guest vocals on many of their album songs. Doug also voiced the Loc-Nar in the short animated crossover 'Heavy Metal vs. Dominator', and voiced the Sith Emperor for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game 'Star Wars: The Old Republic', based in the Star wars universe. In 2020, he created a YouTube channel on which he reads books and poems out loud. He returned on 'Cradle of Filth's' 2021 album, 'Existence Is Futile', providing narration for the track 'Suffer Our Dominion' and the bonus track 'Sisters of the Mist'. In 2022, he voiced the character Goayre Heddagh alongside actor Tim Curry in the animated horror film 'Dagon Troll World Chronicles'.

In 2023 Doug announced he would be playing Batman villain Joe Chill in the CW television show Gotham Knights. This portrayals will be different than other live action versions. The actor says the episode he will be introduced in is titled 'A Chill over Gotham'.

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2024/01/a-history-of-liverpool-thespians-alan.html