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Primarily a stage actor, Peter Eyre was born in New York City, the son of banker Edward Joseph Eyre and his wife, Dorothy Pelline (née Acton). In Britain from the age of twelve, he attended public school but resisted the wishes of his parents to study at Oxford. Instead, he secretly auditioned at RADA. When his acceptance was deferred for a year, he moved to Paris and took drama classes with the Belgian-born thespian Berthe Bovy.
Eyre began his theatrical career in Macbeth at Dublin's Old Vic in 1960. It took another eight years for his first major breakthrough, playing Konstantin in Chekhov's The Seagull, at the Nottingham Playhouse under the direction of Jonathan Miller. Tall, narrow-faced and of dignified comportment, Eyre has subsequently acted in classical roles with the RSC, the Bristol Old Vic and at the West End. Most often cast whenever the role required men of gravitas, he has played lords or princes, on occasion even a Roman Emperor and the Pope. Eyre cited as a career highlight his 1995 Broadway performance as Polonius in Hamlet, co-starring with Ralph Fiennes, Francesca Annis and James Laurenson.
On screen from 1964, Eyre's character roles have echoed those on the stage, ranging from poets to bishops and from butlers to kings. In addition to frequent TV guest roles, he appeared in a quartet of Merchant/Ivory Productions: Maurice (1987) (Reverend Borenius), The Remains of the Day (1993) (British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax), Surviving Picasso (1996) (Picasso's friend and personal secretary Jaume Sabartés), and The Golden Bowl (2000) (antique shop owner A. R. Jarvis). Other portrayals have included the poet Cinna, one of the conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar (1970), Jörgen Tesman, the dullish academic husband of Hedda (1975) (Gabler); Norton Shaw, president of the Royal Geographic Society, in Mountains of the Moon (1990); and King Casiodorus in the fantasy Dragonslayer (1981) .
