Simon MacCorkindale, back on television as Casualty’s new consultant, has been delivering foals rather than lines of late…
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I was never too comfortable as a young actor and always felt that my best time in the business would be around now – I’m 50 – through to the age of 65 I’ve been doing a lot of production work in the past ten years, as well as writing and directing, so the opportunity to do something very visible – in a great part – was much too good to miss My character in Casualty [new consultant Harry Harper] is a disciplinarian, slightly old-fashioned, but pretty cool I’ve been filming since February and it’s a really nice show to be in – egos are at a minimum.
Simon MacCorkindale:
Why I need time away from Susan
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Simon MacCorkindale is convinced he would have become the Army’s youngest general. He feels his dogged determination, dashing looks and slavish adherence to discipline would have sent him hurtling up the ranks. Indeed, thanks to his father’s contacts, a glittering military career was once guaranteed; instead, he chose to become the nearly man of British cinema, a decision he puts down to an in-built self-destruct button which he presses whenever his life is running smoothly.
To the horror of his family, Simon put showbusiness before the Army, and his role opposite Mia Farrow in Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile in 1978 won him the Most Promising Film Actor award when he was 26. From there, anything seemed possible. Only now, years later, after disappearing from the movie actor radar, is he acting again, this time as Harry Harper, a dashing doctor in the BBC’s hospital drama, Casualty. He is expected to cause a stir with his character, who is married but has a penchant for sexy girls; a natural extension to the love-rat image from his TV heyday in the 1980s, when he played Greg Reardon in Falcon Crest.
In the short-lived 1983 series Manimal, college professor Jonathan Chase used his ability to transform into animals to assist law enforcement.
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SIMON MACCORKINDALE was the perfect choice to play the wealthy, cultured Chase. “I thought the concept for Manimal was excellent,” says MacCorkindale. “I also appreciated the fact Chase was a very cerebral individual and that Glen Larson [series creator and producer] had decided to make the show very stylish by having my character be an Englishman who wore expensive suits and drove around in a Rolls Royce. All this was quite unusual for television at that time, so we really were exploring new ground.
“Back in the early Eighties the only other English actor on American television was Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele. Then I got Manimal and a year or two later there was a massive influx of English actors hired for night-time Soap Operas, but Pierce and I started that whole trend. So that, of course, was very much an exciting part of getting the job on Manimal because I knew I had found a foothold in an area that was pretty much virgin territory for Englishmen.
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For an instant, the Range Rover was travelling on two wheels. Then, with a terrifying inevitability, it rolled over on to its side and skidded across three lanes of heavy traffic before coming to a stop on the hard shoulder of the motorway.
Inside the car, Susan George was stunned, battered and bruised. Her head was gushing blood. But when she heard her husband’s voice say: ‘It’s all right darling, we’re alive,’ she knew she was going to survive. It was, without a doubt, nothing short of a miracle that the couple escaped such a crash with their lives. Their Range Rover, on the other hand, was a complete write-off.
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Picture this: a glossy American series where a hunky British actor fights crime, the twist being that he has a unique way of getting out of trouble – he can turn into any animal he chooses (usually a black panther) by looking constipated. Sound like a winner, doesn’t it? Yes, if you thought we were scraping the barrel with our retrospective on Blue Thunder: The Series in SFX, has Jon Abbott got a treat for you…
Created by Glen A Larson, master of gimmick TV, Manimal was a short- lived blend of fantasy series and crime show – just one of a large number of such shows that came and went in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It starred British actor Simon MacCorkindale, reasonably well known in the UK for assorted TV series (most interestingly as scientist Joe Kapp in the 1979 Quatermass serial), films (such as Death on the Nile and the 1978 adaptation of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands), and being married to actress Susan George. MacCorkindale’s career, though promising at one point, never really took off, and choices like Manimal ought begin to explain why…
The acting couple shows us the dream farm that’s allowed them to put down their roots and provides a break from their hectic film careers
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Susan George and Simon MacCorkindale have been cruising along the movie world’s jet-set super-highway for over 20 years. They have probably spent more time in exotic film locations than in their native Britain. Even on their wedding day they were to be found exchanging sacred vows on the paradise isle of Fiji.
But now Susan, at 44, and Simon, at 43, have finally stopped roaming – and it is largely due to the farm they have just moved to on the edge of an old-world village.
The idyllic 17th-century property with its 12 lush acres on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border has given them a clearer perspective, a degree of tranquillity – and forced them to re-evaluate their lives.
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Counterstrike, a hit series about billionaire industrialist Alexander Addington (Christopher Plummer) whose passion for justice is implemented by a three-member strike team.
Plummer is a film and theatre legend. He has starred and costarred in over 40 feature films, including The Sound of Music, The Man Who Would Be King, The Return of The Pink Panther and Star Trek VI.
As Addington on Counterstrike, he formed his strike team after his wife was kidnapped by an international terrorist organization.
The search for her proved unsuccessful. Nevertheless, he vowed that behind the cover of his financial empire, he would help eliminate criminals who currently find sanctuary in the cracks between existing law enforcement organizations.
Leading the strike team is Peter Sinclair (Simon MacCorkindale) – featured on this week’s cover.
Sinclair, a former Scotland Yard inspector – the youngest in the history of the Yard – is also a legendary hostage negotiator.
MacCorkindale made his stage debut at age eight. From this humble beginning, his love for theatre was born. During the next nine years he wrote, produced, directed and/or acted in some 25 productions at school and with local groups.
Upon leaving high school he was accepted as a drama student at Studio 68 of Theatre Arts in London, England. And, as luck would have it, by the end of his first year he was signed to play a leading role in George Bernard Shaw’s The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.
After a number of appearances in the regional theatres in England, he made his West End debut in the highly-acclaimed 1974 production of Pygmalion.
Elite anti-crime team works to uphold justice
Got an international conflict that needs to be handled with a delicate – but effective – touch? The Counterstrike team is ready for action
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They’re a team with a mission. They work behind the scenes, to apprehend criminals who might otherwise be above the law. They also work with an efficiency that can only come from being the best in their respective fields.
They are the Counterstrike team, an elite anti-crime ‘strike-team’ consisting of a multi-billionaire industrialist, a world-renowned journalist, an ex-SEAL, and a former Scotland Yard inspector and hostage negotiator. Counterstrike, now well into its second season, airs 9:30 pm Saturdays on NTV.
The action-adventure series blasted onto the scene in November of 1991, with an episode featuring a brutal terriorist kidnapping. Ultra-wealthy Alexander Addington (played by Christopher Plummer) was shot and his wife kidnapped by a group of international criminals. Addington finds his efforts to save his wife stiffled by bureaucracy and vows to do everything to uphold justice.
SIMON MACCORKINDALE
IN ‘COUNTERSTRIKE’, ELITE CRIME-BUSTERS TAKE ON INTERNATIONAL THUG
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It won’t win any awards for plausibility but Counterstrike (CTV, Saturdays) is just what the action fan ordered a combination of James Bond, Mission: Impossible and Charlie’s Angels with the accent on pyrotechnics. The plot spins on the exploits of an elite strike team of international crime-fighters.
Christopher Plummer gets star billing, but 39-year-old British actor Simon MacCorkindale is the series’ power- source. Although he has plenty of stage experience, MacCorkindale is best known to Canadian audiences for the movies Death on the Nile and The Sword and the Sorcerer, and for TV roles in I, Claudius, Falcon Crest, and Dynasty. He brings a natural credibility and depth of personality to Peter Sinclair, the dashing team leader recruited because of his savvy as Scotland Yard’s youngest-ever inspector.
Simon MacCorkindale and Susan George
Life, love, and working together has created their happy marriage
Britain’s glamorous screen couple give their first interview to Hello!
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It will be six years this October since Susan George, star of Straw Dogs and two dozen other movies, married archetypal English actor Simon MacCorkindale in a secret wedding ceremony on the beautiful paradise isle of Fiji. But now, in their first ever interview together, this attractive couple talk candidly about their lives.
They also reveal how their relationship has been strengthened by their work together as die co- producers of their own thriving film company, Amy International (named after Susan’s role in Straw Dogs). Their second feature film, That Summer Of White Roses, in which Susan co-stars with Tom Conti and Rod Steiger, is due to be released on video on July 19.
Simon, who made his name in films like Death On The Nile and Jaws 3-D, went on to star in his own TV series, Mammal, and became a mainstay of the American soap, Falcon Crest. He is the son of an RAF officer, she the daughter of a saxophonist-turned-hotelier father and an ex-dancer mother.
Previously Susan spent four years apiece with American singer Jack Jones and subsequently with her manager, Derek Webster. Of her marriage to Simon she confesses: “I always wanted to be married, it was just I hadn’t met the right man and now I have.”
Says Simon: “Susie was like a breath of fresh air and I simply fell in love with her. I wouldn’t have married again (his first wife was Fiona Fullerton) if I didn’t think it was going to be for life, but I feel Susie and I have as much chance as any couple of going through a lifetime together. She’s taught me to play more and laugh more. She’s given me a sense of fun.”
They share that sense of fun at a fabulous riverside mansion in leafy Buckinghamshire where they invited HELLO! for this exclusive interview.
Susan George and Simon MacCorkindale
Wedded to the Screen and Each Other
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Celebrities come and go in Hollywood. Those who stay possess something unusual, something more than just talent. Wits may call it luck, and perhaps sometimes luck does make a difference. But mostly what makes the difference is business smarts talent plus an ability to grasp the complex imperatives that drive both the industry and careers.If any two people working in the entertainment industry possess that extra “plus” it’s Susan George and Simon MacCorkindale, whose 1984 marriage on the island of Fiji made international headlines. MacCorkindale, who first drew major audience attention in Death on the Nile, has labored as lawyer Greg Reardon on the hit nighttime soap Falcon Crest for the last two years. Susan George has been delighting audiences worldwide from her debut in Michael Game’s Billion Dollar Brain through over two dozen screen appearances to 1984’s hit film The Jigsaw Man, also with Michael Caine.
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Not too long ago, the prestigious Los Angeles Times published a long story about the new stars of tomorrow. They were all under 25, some under 20, and while the young men might make some young girls’ hearts go pittypat, women who are looking for real MEN won’t find the answer in these heartthrobs.
So let us consider British Simon MacCorkindale, who can and probably does raise blood pressure in all women. He’s tallЧsix feet. He’s slim, about 165 pounds. He has fashionably coiffed hair, not too long, not too short. It’s sort of brownish blond. Perhaps a bit sunbleached because he plays a lot of tennis. And this writer’s notes read “Honorable blue eyes.” It was a first impression obviously.
What ARE honorable blue eyes? That’s opposed to shifty. Here is a man you can trust. A stalwart soul who’s wondrously attractiveЧthe English accent just adds to his charm. And a wicked sense of humor goes with the package.
For those who haven’t been paying attention this year, Simon plays Greg Reardon, the attorney on CBS’ “Falcon Crest.” To date this season, he has dallied with Ana Alicia, who plays Melissa; with Sarah Douglas, who’s Pamela and with Laura Johnson, as Terry. The latter two women, he confides, are leaving the show at the end of this season. Out in the real world, Simon is married to actress-producer Susan George.
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Merely transforming into a wide variety of animals from a black leopard to a high flying hawk should pose no problem to British star Simon MacCorkindale, who stars as Jonathan Chase in the 20th Century- Fox Television series, “Manimal”.
“In recent pictures and series I’ve been shot and killed, had my hand bashed, was caught by a bullet in the shoulder, hanged, beheaded, drowned, hung in chains, tortured, and in “Jaws 3D”, I was devoured by a 35-ft. shark,” the handsome leading man confided.
MacCorkindale, who came to the United States in 1981, is a native of Cambridge, England, who made his professional stage debut at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England, in “A Bequest to the Nation”. His first international television assignment was in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth ” in which he played Lucius, the centurion who was strongly featured in the last hour of the six-hours epic. Curiously enough, he also played Lucius, the son of Emperor Augustus, in “I Claudius”.
Among his roles on British TV have been Sir Thomas Walsingham in “Will Shakespeare”, Romeo in “Romeo and Juliet”, the callous vet in “Baby”, poet Siegfried Sassoon in “Out of Battle”, the naive Oxford graduate in Elinor Glyn’s “Three Weeks”, along with appearances in “Just William ” and Dr. Dady in the series set in a woman’s prison, “Within These Walls”.
What he considers the major break of his career was his being cast as Simon Doyle, the smooth, avaricious young murderer in “Death on the Nile”. He was presented to the Queen at the Royal Premiere in London, by which time he had completed a role in marked contrast, the tough sailor hero in Erskine Guilders classic spy story, “The Riddle of the Sands”.
