Geoffrey Beevers

Born

1941-01-15

Birthplace

Chichester, West Sussex, England, UK

Biography

Geoffrey Beevers (born 15 January 1941, in Chichester, Sussex, England) is a British actor, writer, and director with a career spanning over five decades across stage, television, and film. The only son of D. Beevers, he was educated at Tonbridge School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read History and took a B.A. in 1962, before training at LAMDA. He made his London stage debut in 1964 with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Peter Brook's production of The Screens, and went on to perform at the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, and the West End. He is best known to Doctor Who fans as the third actor to play the Master in the 1981 serial The Keeper of Traken (credited on-screen only as "Melkur" to keep the reveal a surprise), a role he has since reprised in numerous Big Finish Productions audio dramas. He was married to actress Caroline John, who played Liz Shaw in Doctor Who, from 1970 until her death in 2012; they had three children. His film credits include Victor/Victoria (1982), Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Goodnight Mister Tom (1998, as the vicar), Clash of the Titans (2010), Miss Potter (2006), The Edge of Love (2008), Legend (2015), and The Sandman (2022). On television, he has appeared in over two hundred productions including The Jewel in the Crown (1984), A Very British Coup (1988), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), Yes, Prime Minister (1986), Red Dwarf (1988), Jonathan Creek (1997), Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989), The Railway Children (2000), The Tudors (2007), Plebs (2013), and Slow Horses. In theatre, Beevers has worked extensively at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, both as an actor (including the title role in Jules Romain's Doctor Knock, 1994) and as an adaptor/director of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1990, for which he won a Time Out Award), Silas Marner (1998), and Balzac's Père Goriot (1994). He has also done extensive radio work for the BBC, and published his autobiography, One Man In His Time — The Life of a Working Actor, in 2025.