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
When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
In the film world, we can all be heroes. In the real world, where heroism can cost you your life or the life of the ones you love, people aren't so willing to make those sacrifices. When they do, they are set apart from the rest of us.
Sometimes you learn more from films that aren't terribly successful and, indeed, sometimes you learn more from real disasters than you do from the ones that succeed.
Many do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a joy it is. From it, we get real democracy. From it, we get the sort of intellectual tolerance that allows me to propound something that may be completely alien to you.
When you've opened your heart to a child as you have to, there's always the fear that you may discover that the child is not viable. Losing that child is not a position you want to find yourself in.
When you think about a walking tree, laughter is the response.
We live in a modest system, a galaxy called the Milky Way. If we named every star in the Milky Way and put them in the Hollywood telephone directory and stacked those telephone directories up, we'd have a pile of telephone directories 70 miles high.
I think I have more stamps in my passport than most stamp collectors have in their collections.
People have become disillusioned with Parliament, and that threatens democracy.
My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.
I was offered the opportunity to narrate the Catholic bible, and it was something I really wanted to be involved with.
When the writers themselves are a bit out of control, and their lives are collapsing around them, they seem to rejoice in misery and celebrate the wrong sort of things.
As I come towards the end of my life, you get to see things in a slightly different perspective.
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.