Jeremy Swift is an Award winning English actor, a veteran stage and theater actor, a television actor, a film actor, and the main regular actor featured in the Apple TV+ series, Ted Lasso and played the character Leslie Higgins, the Head of Football Director for AFC Richmond, and Rebecca Welton's personal assistant.
He is perhaps best known on both sides of the Atlantic for his Screen Actors Guild-nominated role asSpratt in Downton Abbey. A staple off British television with roles stretching back to the 1980s, he made notable contributions to such British classics as Next of Kin, Vanity Fair, Blind Men, The Smoking Room, The Crimson Field, Foyle's War, and Doctors.
History[]
Jeremy Swift was born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham. Not much can be said about his personal life but he is married to actress Mary Roscoe (who plays Higgins' wife, Julie Higgins, on Ted Lasso), whom he met while working on a play. They have two adopted children.
He studied drama at Guildford School of Acting from 1978 to 1981 and worked almost exclusively in theatre throughout the 1980s, working with companies such as Deborah Warner's Kick Theatre company and comedy performance-art group The People Show. During this period he also appeared in numerous television commercials.
Careers and Awards[]
Theater[]
In the 1990s, he acted at the National Theatre alongside David Tennant and Richard Wilson in Phyllida Lloyd's production of What the Butler Saw. Swift appeared in Gosford Park playing the footman Arthur, and Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist as Mr. Bumble. For BBC3, he played Barry in the cult hit The Smoking Room and had a theatrical hit with Abigail's Party, the last production at the old Hampstead Theatre and their longest running West End transfer.
Film[]
In 2009, he played the lead in the true story of art forger Shaun Greenhalgh in The Antiques' Rogue Show for BBC2 with Liz Smith and Peter Vaughn, The Deacon in a film adaptation of Anton Chekhov's short story The Duel and featured in Canoe Man, a 2010 TV drama based on the John Darwin disappearance case.
He starred in the independent British feature film Downhill, which is a comedy about four men attempting Alfred Wainwright's Coast to Coast Walk which was released in 2014 and co-stars Ned Dennehy, Karl Theobald and Richard Lumsden. The film was directed by James Rouse and the screenplay was written by Torben Betts.
TV[]
On ITV, Swift played Septimus Spratt, the butler of the Dowager Countess, in Downton Abbey for three seasons and has been seen as Dennis, manservant to Countess Mavrodaki (Leslie Caron) in Episodes 3-6 of The Durrells. He also played election agent Glenvil Harris in the last two series of Foyle's War.
In 2020, he played the role of Leslie Higgins in Apple TV+'s show, Ted Lasso, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2021.
External link[]
- Jeremy Swift at IMDb