John Rhys-Davies
John Rhys-Davies
John Rhys-Daviesis a Welsh actor and voice actor known for his portrayal of Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the charismatic Arab excavator Sallah in the Indiana Jones films. He also played Agent Michael Malone in the 1993 remake of the 1950s television series The Untouchables, Pilot Vasco Rodrigues in the mini-series Shōgun, Professor Maximillian Arturo in Sliders, King Richard I in Robin of Sherwood, General Leonid Pushkin in the James Bond film The Living Daylights, and...
NationalityWelsh
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth5 May 1944
I was offered the opportunity to narrate the Catholic bible, and it was something I really wanted to be involved with.
If you've gotta follow a fashion, pick a good fashion, I say, yes.
Intellectually, now, I believe that it is a complete vanity to say positively there is no God.
I'm not actually sure that actors or artists should be allowed to have a family, because the focus you need, the egotism, the myopia, is just taking away from the relationship.
'Indiana Jones' wasn't physically tough, but they are the only two films I've ever been ill on. On 'The Last Crusade,' I got sciatica. That's when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves.
I am a believer in the evolutionary process, and yet I have sympathy for the friends of mine who are creationists. I don't find the positions incompatible.
How stupid do you have to be to imagine that you can turn 'The Lord Of The Rings' into a film script?
If I had a bloody tattoo for every film I'd done, I'd be a walking billboard.
I count myself a a rationalist and a skeptic with a very conscious awareness of my indebtedness to Western Christian civilization, and I am a fairly passionate defender of it.
The most despised sector of Hollywood are the writers. A good writer is quickly promoted to a 'concept man' - and then a producer - because he's too valuable to simply be a writer.
I enjoy acting. It's not that I begin to think I'm getting better. I now fully know that I've made no improvement whatsoever since I was 20. I can live with it.
Spying is a like a game of chess: Sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win - preferably a knight rather than a king or queen.
The script of 'Shogun' was so tight that you could not take a word out of a sentence, you could not take a sentence out of a scene, and you certainly couldn't take out a scene without putting ripples right through the back or the front of the overall story.
Actually, I'm addicted to science fiction. Let me make my diction clear - I love sci-fi.