Jonathan Rigby


Jonathan Rigby is an English actor and film historian who has written several books. He has been described in Video Watchdog magazine as occupying 'a proud place in the advance guard of film researchers, writers and critics.'
In his parallel career as an actor, Rigby played the psychic researcher Harry Price in the part-animated 2017 feature film Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England. Previously he played Kenneth Horne throughout the eighteen-month run of the West End hit Round the Horne... Revisited ; the production was adapted for BBC Four and featured in the 2004 Royal Variety Performance. In 2008-09 he reprised the role in a regional tour of Round the Horne - Unseen and Uncut and in the BBC Radio special Twice Ken is Plenty, then in 2017–18 he appeared in a new stage show called Horne A'Plenty. Some of his earlier theatre work, particularly in Shakespeare, is discussed by Owen Dudley Edwards in the 1991 book City of a Thousand Worlds: Edinburgh in Festival.
Rigby's stage adaptation of Dracula toured during 1997, the original novel's centenary year, and in 2013-14 he directed a successful revival of the forgotten Sylvia Rayman play Women of Twilight. He is also an Associate Research Fellow of the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, and has contributed audio and/or video commentaries to the DVD/Blu-ray releases of numerous horror films. In 2010 he was series consultant on the three-part BBC Four documentary A History of Horror, also making a brief appearance as Dracula in the opening episode. Two years later he was programme consultant on the feature-length follow-up, Horror Europa.

Selected publications