>Biography >Stats & Training >Skills            >Video Clips >Voice Clips >Picture Galleries

—————

A Yorkshireman, Derek Bell was born in Halifax and raised in Doncaster. It was a decade when not even Billy Elliotts could impress the prevailing culture enough to be sent to Drama or Dance School. He had to be satisfied with an LGSM in Speech and Drama studied externally, alongside A-levels and Oxford Entrance, followed by song and dance training during academic life at Oxford and Reading Universities, then in Italy, Germany and the Middle East… until at an advanced age his formal theatre training actually began, taken at Arts Educational Schools.

So no mid-life crises, then.

Theatre work includes No.1 tours with several companies, his favourite leads being Larry (Murder with Love) and Manningham (Gaslight); seasons at Chelmsford and Chesterfield, returning to Chelmsford last year to play Sheppard (Alibi); leads at Hampstead (Partners in Crime), Edmonton (Outside Edge), Wimbledon (Michaelangelo’s Slave) and Johnny Ball’s Charles Darwin. His Shakespeare roles have been at Reading’s Progress Theatre (Ariel), at Hamburg’s English Theatre (Feste), in Heartbreak’s Hamlet Tour (Claudius), and at the Bushey and Tallyllyn Festivals. He was Arthur in Graham Watts’ spectacular and very physical production of Godber’s Up’n’Under, at London Ashcroft and Chelmsford Civic, and Frank in This Happy Breed at the Wimbledon Theatre.

Musical theatre work includes Kean (Watford Palace), Guettel’s Floyd Collins (Bridewell), Chater and Chater’s Pinocchio (Hounslow), Adrian Hilton/Wayne Sleep’s Roll Over Jehovah! (Hampstead) and the surreal experience of Francesca Zambello’s Tosca (Earl’s Court). In Children’s Theatre he has performed leads in Doncaster, Cheltenham, Swaledale, and at London’s Charles Cryer Children’s Theatre.

Film and Television credits include HTV, The Bill, Crimewatch, EastEnders, 20/20TV, Bliokh in Potemkin: The Runner’s Cut with Charles Dance, and, in order to avoid neglecting any medium at all, Geri Halliwell’s video It’s Raining Men. His corporate work involves extensive filming, roleplaying, facilitating and image consultancy.

Lengthy stays in parts of Europe and the Middle East, during which he normally lived as a native rather than as an expat, took him away from his 3-bedroom semi in leafy Streatham; but when in London and not gardening, he stays fit with tennis, swimming, scuba, squash coaching .... and badminton, in one short but glorious burst, to county standard. He’s good at bowling, riding (horses and camels), a competitive fencer, a dancer (NATD Gold in tap), and a trained baritone. He’s a hopeless pianist and violinist, but vaguely useful on guitar.

Derek Bell's non-theatrical qualifications include those in Linguistics, as a translator/interpreter English-German, German-English, and as a DES-number English & Maths teacher. He has an Italian ex-wife to thank for ability in conversational Italian, and his school laziness to thank for dreadful French. He still has the unmarked, unchanged-address driving licence of 27 years ago, which modern bobbies don’t believe is one.