Leslie Lawton

Charles Pentwick

Leslie was born in Scotland and started his career as a child actor in television and films before joining the Liverpool Playhouse Company. He then appeared with all the major regional companies, played leading roles in several West End plays and musicals and starred in countless TV series and plays in the UK, USA and Canada.

On stage he was the first British actor to star in two Kander & Ebb musicals – as the MC in Cabaret and as Billy Flynn in the first national tour of Chicago. Other tours include the leading roles in Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Present Laughter and Absurd Person Singular. He also toured the UK and played a London season in his own one man show Song & Dance Man.At the age of 19 he was the youngest ever director of television commercials and he then went on to work in the theatre, first as a freelance and then as Artistic Director of 5 companies including the Liverpool Playhouse and the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum.He left Edinburgh to join Ray Cooney’s Theatre Of Comedy Company – first as an actor taking over from Michael Williams in a leading role in the West End hit Two Into One and then as Artistic Co-Ordinator of the company.

Since leaving the company in 1991 he has worked both as an actor and director in 26 countries around the World including Canada, the USA, Australia, the Far and Middle East, several Scandinavian countries and, most recently, Israel where he was named Director of The Year (the only non-Israeli ever to receive this honour). He currently has two long-running hits in Tel Aviv Barefoot in the Park and Plaza Suite (both by Neil Simon and both in Hebrew!) and returns there this summer to direct the Israeli premiere of Noel Coward’s Private Lives.For the BBC he directed Dame Judi Dench and an all-star cast in Hay Fever, Sir Norman Wisdom in the comedy series Robin Hood and Dame Thora Hird in In Loving Memory.He wrote As Dorothy Parker Once Said… (with music by Sandy Wilson) which was seen in the West End and on a lengthy national tour in which he co-starred with Libby Morris for whom he also wrote and directed Women’s Libby which premiered at Hampstead Theatre before being seen all over the World. He has adapted plays by August Strindberg and Joshua Sobol forthe English theatre, has written extensively for television and for the national press and is currently writing his autobiography.

He played leading roles in the London productions of It Runs in the Family and in Run For Your Wife! (for four years in the West End and on the subsequent World Tour for Derek Nimmo’s British Airways Playhouse for whom he worked many times over a period of ten years).He made his Vienna English Theatre debut two years ago when he played Timothy in Rex Garner’s production of There Goes the Bride.