Andrew Hilton

Andrew Piers Marsden Hilton (born 21 October 1947) is an English actor, theatre director and author, best known for the creation of the Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory company in Bristol in 1999. He remains its Artistic Director.

Hilton was born in Bolton, Lancashire, and educated at Bolton School. He read English at Churchill College, Cambridge, studying under George Steiner and Michael Long. He worked as a student actor for Jonathan Miller (in the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company's Hamlet and Julius Caesar) and via that connection entered the professional theatre as a trainee director at Bernard Miles' Mermaid Theatre in London. There he worked from 1971 to 1975, much of his time directing and writing plays about science for the theatre's educational wing, the Molecule Theatre. He became a Mermaid Associate Director in 1974.

In 1975 he joined the Greenwich Company as an actor for Jonathan Miller's productions of Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, quickly followed by a 3-year contract with the National Theatre, beginning at the London Old Vic and moving to the new theatre on the South Bank. There he appeared in the Peter Hall/Albert Finney Hamlet and Tamburlaine the Great, the John Schlesinger/John Gielgud Julius Caesar, Elijah Moshinky's production of Troilus & Cressida (as Diomedes), and Michael Blakemore's production of Ben Travers' Plunder.

He then joined the Bristol Old Vic company in 1978, where he played in over twenty productions, roles including Haig and the Sergeant-Major in Oh What a Lovely War!, Flavius in Timon of Athens, Kershaw in Destiny, Ernst in Cabaret and Wyke in Sleuth. It was there in 1983 that he met his wife-to-be, the stage manager and artist, Diana Favell. There followed several years of TV and radio work, interspersed with theatre jobs in Manchester and York, a UK tour of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and a British Council tour of the Far and Middle East.

In 1989 Hilton and Favell joined a group of actors, writers and directors to start the first regular pub theatre in Bristol, dedicated largely to new writing. The company, Show of Strength Theatre Company, found the Hen & Chicken pub in the south of the city, in Bedminster, and inaugurated winter seasons there that were to last for six years and attract national attention.

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