Biographie
English stage and screen actor, recently recognized for his role as the Targaryen loyalist Grand Maester Mellos in HBO's epic series House of the Dragon (2022). Born in London to Morris Horovitch, a child care worker, and his wife Alice, a teacher, he was educated in Hertfordshire and trained in acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Horovitch made his theatrical debut in Saint Joan at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham in 1966. From 1982 to 2004, he performed in plays at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, with notable roles including Prospero in The Tempest and Torvald Helmer in Ibsen's A Doll's House. Beginning his screen career in 1970, he gained fame as Detective Inspector Slack, an amateur magician and acquaintance of Miss Marple, in five BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries, starting with Miss Marple: The Body in the Library (1984). He also played Commander Daniels, a murder suspect, in the Poirot episode The Kidnapped Prime Minister (1989).
In the early 1980s, Horovitch starred in the lesser-known TV series Bognor (1981) as a special investigator for the Board of Trade. The series comprised twenty-one half-hour episodes and was cancelled after two seasons following a management change at Thames Television. Horovitch has appeared in numerous other crime and action series, including The New Avengers (1976), The Sandbaggers (1978), Bulman (1985), A Touch of Frost (1992), and Foyle's War (2002), as well as in period dramas and literary adaptations such as the Queen's physician Sir James Clark in The Young Victoria (2009); the dissolute, debt-ridden Reverend Bute Crawley in Vanity Fair (1987); and Miss Havisham's cousin Matthew Pocket in Great Expectations (1999). More recently, he has been cast in roles of senior rank or status, including a German World War II Vice Admiral in The Man with the Iron Heart (2017) and Cardinal Conroy, who sends Sister Irene on her demon-hunting mission in The Nun (2018) and its sequel.
Horovitch has also narrated several audiobooks, including Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, as well as poetry readings of Wordsworth and Shelley.
