We're delighted to wish a big Happy Birthday to our star audio book reader Nickolas Grace who was born on the 21st November 1947 in Merseyside, England.

Nickolas trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and his career has spanned the stage, film and television. Stage appearances include roles with The Royal Shakespeare Company and he is a freqent performer in London’s West End. His many film roles include Two Deaths, Tom & Viv, and Salome's Last Dance.

But it is chiefly for his representation of evil and lascivious aristocrats in his many television appearances that Nickolas is most famed – in particular his portrayal of Anthony Blanche in the BBC’s Brideshead Revisited and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin of Sherwood, a role on in which he became the only Sheriff of Nottingham on film, stage or television ever to have killed Robin Hood!

But, of course, there is a humerous side to Nickolas and his unabridged audio book performance of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is a perfect example. Jerome K Jerome's book was intended to be a serious travel guide. It failed dismally in this respect, but succeeded in becoming an hilarious account of a boating holiday on the Thames, between Kingston and Oxford.

It is a wonderful story and is the sourceof one of the great quotes about the pressures of the modern working life – 'I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours !'

Happy Birthday Nickolas, from all of us at Silksoundbooks.

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