Bill Homewood

After training, Homewood joined the Sadler's Wells New Opera Company of Sadler's Wells at the London Coliseum (later the English Opera Company) as a principal, playing opposite John Tomlinson as Historian in Elizabeth Lutyens's Time Off, and performed in concert and oratorio. He also travelled in solo cabaret (songs with guitar) across Britain and started his television career on BBC Children's Television where he became a regular in such shows as Watch, Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore, Rainbow and So You Want to be Top?. He was well known as "The Backwards Man",[2] owing to his unusual ability to speak (and sing) backwards, demonstrated in his regular performance as Ron Gad in The Adventure Game for the BBC.[3][4] Also for the BBC he played Blondel in The Talisman[5] and Player King in Hamlet with Derek Jacobi in the title role.[6]

Homewood also worked as Examiner in (Classical Spanish) Guitar at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and ran a Saturday guitar school in West London – even though his performing career was veering from Music towards Theatre.

In 1990 he directed Romeo & Juliet starring Roland Gift at Hull Truck, which transferred to London (Shaw Theatre) and New York (Stony Brook Theatre). His other American directing credits include the musical Naughty Marietta at the Sundome in Phoenix, Arizona, the opera The Secret Marriage at the Eastman Theatre, NY and Noises Off at Florida Atlantic Theatre, Florida. In 2006/7 he directed Macbeth and Shakespeare: Les Feux, Les Artifices (in French) at the Conservatoire Nationale de France in Montpellier.

Homewood's radio drama credits include Captain Hook in Peter Pan (PBS Radio, US) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning for BBC Radio. He has recorded several audiobook CDs for companies such as Naxos, including Les Misérables, The Three Musketeers, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, The Man In The Iron Mask, Tom Jones, King Solomon's Mimes, She, Gargantua & Pantagruel, Shakespeare's Lovers (with Estelle Kohler) and the Zorro series. Homewood's Count Of Monte Cristo for Naxos is an evergreen audiobook best-seller.[7]

In 2016 Ukemi Audiobooks released Great French Poems, a solo album in which Homewood performs 35 classics, delivering each poem first in French and then in his own English translation.[8]

In 1979 Homewood was made Honorary Citizen of Austin, Texas. He has held several visiting appointments in conservatories and universities, including Visiting Fellow in Theatre at Lancaster University, Dean of the British American Drama Academy and has been twice Eminent Chair in Theatre at Florida Atlantic University.[9]

In 1983 he founded the Shakespeare text course at RADA, London.[10] In the 1980s Homewood founded and devised the Shakespeare On Stage (SOS) program in Missouri and Ohio, for Young Audiences Inc.. SOS was based in Kansas City and used actors from the Missouri Repertory Theatre for educational outreach work.

His many other guest academic appointments included: Temp Head of Music at Thomas Huxley College in Ealing, London; Acting Director of the Opera Department at the Eastman School of Music; New York, Visiting Professor of Shakespeare in Montpellier at both the Université Paul Valéry, and the Conservatoire National de France. Since 1980 Bill Homewood has taught occasional workshops in Shakespeare and Audition Technique at the London Actors Professional Centre.