Timothy Simon Roth (born 14 May 1961) is a British actor and producer. He began acting on films and television series in the 1980s. He was among a group of prominent British actors of the era, the "Brit Pack".
He made his television debut in Made in Britain (1982), and his film debut in The Hit (1984), for which he was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Since then, he gained more attention for his roles in films, including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, (1989), Vincent & Theo (1990), and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990). Roth collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on several films, such as Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Four Rooms (1995) and The Hateful Eight (2015). For his performance in Rob Roy (1995), Roth won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Roth made his directorial debut with the film The War Zone (1999). He played Cal Lightman in the Fox series Lie to Me (2009–2011) and Jim Worth / Jack Devlin in the Sky Atlantic series Tin Star (2017–2020). Roth also portrayed Emil Blonsky / Abomination in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Incredible Hulk (2008), reprising the role in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) and the Disney series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022).
Early life
Roth was born in Dulwich, London, the son of Ann, a painter and teacher, and Ernie, a Fleet Street journalist and painter. His father was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to a family of Irish descent. Although he was not of Jewish background, his father changed his surname from "Smith" to the German/Yiddish "Roth" in the 1940s, as "an act of anti-Nazi solidarity".
Roth is a survivor of child sexual abuse, committed by his paternal grandfather, who he has stated sexually abused him from childhood until his early teen years. He first revealed that he was a victim of sexual abuse during press for his 1999 directorial debut, The War Zone, a film which dealt with the topics of incest and sexual violence within a family, but declined to name the perpetrator at that time. In December 2016, he gave an interview to The Guardian in which he revealed that his abuser was his grandfather, who had also abused his father when he was a child.
Roth attended school in Lambeth, before moving to Croydon Technical School due to bullying. He attended the Strand School in Tulse Hill. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at London's Camberwell College of Arts.
