August 13, 2012

David Tennant has portrayed many real life historical figures throughout his career starting in drama school.
 

David narrated four performances of Mozart A to Z on March 5,6,8 and 9, 1991 at the New Athenaeum Theatre, Glasgow.The Opera School staged the performances to celebrate the composer's bicentenary and David read excerpts from letters that Mozart had written between selections from his operas.

"David Tennant played Mozart. He not only looked good in the part, but his performance was full of character, witty, poignant and pleasantly lacking in sentimentality . . all in a robust Scottish acccent too." - The Herald - Wilma Paterson - March 6, 1991

He also appeared in a musical called The Matchgirls while at school playing the part of George Bernard Shaw. The play is based on fact and tells the story of a strike by the girls in a match factory in 1888, when unions were still groping for recognition and mass withdrawal of labour was an almost unheard-of strategy in industrial relations. The match-cutters finally rebel against working conditions in which young girls had their jaws rotted away by phosphorus, and discipline was maintained by a system of crippling fines and sanctions.

During the 1996 RSC season he portrayed Col. Alexander Hamilton, George Washington's aid in The General From America. The play is about Benedict Arnold's betrayal of his country during the Revolutionary War.

"...the alert, intelligent David Tennant as Hamilton, Washington's secretary, who firmly interrogates Arnold while holding a quill in one hand and a cup of tea and a piece of cake in the other."

The Independent on Sunday - July 28, 1996 - Robert Butler

Also in the 1996 season he portrayed Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed, a played that is based on the 1613 slander suit brought by Susanna Hall (Shakespeare's daughter) and her husband against John Lane Jr.

"And Tennant's 17th century lad, a fool to himself and a menace to peace of mind and good order, is funny and even queasily engaging, against the plot's odds." - Daily Mail - Shaun Usher - November 6, 1996

 In 2005 he starred in the BBC Three mini-series Casanova as Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, which was a break out role for him in his career.

In 2006 he had a small part in the BBC mini-series The Romantics, about the 18th century Romanticism movement.  David portrayed Jean-Jacques Rousseau a Genevan philosopher, writer and composer.

 

 Also in 2006 he portrayed Richard Hoggart in the BBC TV movie The Chatterley Affair which was about the 1960 Obscene Publications Act trail for the D H Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover.  Hoggart, who was an English Professor at Birmingham University, testified in favor of the book at the trial.    

In 2008 David starred in Einstein & Eddington, a film about British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, who in 1919 provided the first confirmation of Einstein’s theory that gravity will bend the path of light.