John Graham-Davies is a Canadian-born actor, writer, and left-wing political activist, most famous for playing Les Hunter in the soap-opera Hollyoaks from 2001 to 2005. During his early career Graham-Davies was a member of the Canadian National Theater, appearing in Troilus and Cressida, Camino Real and touring nationally in Hamlet. He was in the original cast of John Godber's 1983 play Bouncers. He worked at a number of theatres in the eighties and nineties, including Leeds Playhouse, where he played John Proctor in Arthur Miller'sThe Crucible, as well as the Sheffield Crucible Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, Swan Theatre, Worcester and the Manchester Library Theatre, and with various political theatre companies, including 7:84 England. From the late eighties he started working mainly in television, and he has appeared in Coronation Street in 1989 and 2000, Alan Bleasdale's GBH, Emmerdale, Brookside, Heartbeat in 1999 and Cracker in 1993, as well as other TV dramas and soaps, including Floodtide, Harry, and The Chief. He appeared in the Granada TV expose of the framing of the Birmingham Six, Who Bombed Birmingham?, and in the BBC play Reasonable Force, about the killing of Blair Peach. From 1995 to 1998 he played DCI Peter Adams alongside Patricia Routledge in the BBC's Hetty Wainthropp Investigates and also played a police officer in Jimmy McGovern's acclaimed drama about the Hillsborough Disaster as well as appearing in Cold Feet and COPS. He played Myra Hyndley's QC, Godfrey Heilpern, in the ITV drama , opposite Maxine Peake, as well as numerous other off appearances in The Bill, Casualty and Casualty 1909. In 2014 he appeared in Coronation Street, playing the judge in the Peter Barlow trial. During the eighties Graham-Davies was a regular voice in Radio 4 drama. During the late nineties, his one-man play, Taking Sides, based on his experiences taking aid convoys to Bosnia, was performed internationally and broadcast by BBC World Service. Another radio play, Huskar, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2003. Graham-Davies occasionally still teaches creative writing at the University of Bolton and drama at Liverpool John Moores University. In Spring 2009, Graham-Davies' play Beating Berlusconi, based on Liverpool FC's remarkable 2005 UEFA Champions League victory over A.C. Milan began touring across venues on Merseyside including the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and has subsequently toured internationally, with a Norwegian production opening in the autumn of 2011. It has also been published in Italian. Beating Berlusconi returns in 2018, supported by UNITEtheunion. Unsung, co-written by James Quinn, about the blind 19th-century abolitionist Edward Rushton, premiered at the Liverpool Everyman, co-produced by DaDaFest and Turf Love.
Political views and controversies
Davies is an active member of Liverpool Friends of Palestine, and a signatory of the Artists for Palestine pledge not to work in Israel. A member and former branch chairman of St Michael's Branch of the Labour Party within Liverpool Riverside CLP, Davies was suspended in April 2019 and was re-admitted to the Labour Party in July 2019, having been cleared of any charge of anti-semitism.
