Actor
PETER FRANCIS JAMES is a two time Obie Award winner, whose Broadway appearances include Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl, Barack, in Hillary and Clinton, Present Laughter (w/Kevin Kline), The Merchant of Venice (w/Al Pacino), On Golden Pond (w/James Earl Jones), Drowning Crow, and Judgment at Nuremberg.
Television and film credits include: The Godfather of Harlem, The Code, The Bold Type, Oz, Gossip Girls, Kings, The Royal Pains, all three Law & Order series, The Rosa Parks Story (w/ Angela Bassett), Thurgood Marshall in Simple Justice, The Ruby Bridges Story, The Losers, The Pack, The Rebound, The Messenger and Joe Gould’s Secret.
He appeared in The Lady From Dubuque with Dame Maggie Smith (London — Theatre Royal Haymarket) and he starred as Colin Powell in David Hare’s Stuff Happens, at The Public Theater (OBIE, Lucille Lortel, and Drama Desk Awards). He has performed many Shakespeare roles including Othello in Othello, (Baltimore Center Stage), Oberon, in Sir Peter Hall’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Ahmanson), Coriolanus in Coriolanus, and for The Public, Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing, Pisanio in Cymbeline, Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida, Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet, Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar, and Horatio in Kevin Kline’s Hamlet. Other theater credits include August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (Mark Taper Forum, L.A.), House of Flowers (Encores!), Suzan-Lori Park’s Venus, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Public), Claire in The Maids (OBIE Award) and Jupiter in Amphitryon (CSC), Scent of the Roses (with Julie Harris), and Jean in Miss Julie (McCarter).
He has narrated more than 70 books. He taught Shakespeare at the Yale School of Drama from 2000-2020, and at BADA at Oxford, as well as master classes at Peking University and Shanghai Theater Institute. He is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.