Age: 76
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William Francis Nighy (born 12 December 1949) is an English actor. Known for his work on screen and stage, he has received numerous awards, including two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Tony Award. Nighy started his career with the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool and made his London debut with the Royal National Theatre starting with The Illuminatus! in 1977. There he gained acclaim for his roles in David Hare's Pravda in 1985, Harold Pinter's Betrayal in 1991, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in 1993, and Anton Chekov's The Seagull in 1994. He received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination for his performance in Blue/Orange in 2001. He made his Broadway debut in Hare's The Vertical Hour in 2006, and returned in the 2015 revival of Hare's Skylight earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. Early film roles include in the comedies Still Crazy (1998), and Blow Dry (1999) before his breakout role in Love Actually (2003) which earned him a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. He soon gained recognition portraying Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series (2006-2007), and Viktor in the Underworld film series (2003-2009). Other films include Shaun of the Dead (2004), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), Hot Fuzz (2007), Valkyrie (2008), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 (2010), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), About Time (2013), Emma (2020), and Living (2022), the last of these earning him his first career Academy Award nomination. Nighy has gained acclaim for his roles in television earning a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his performance in BBC One series State of Play (2003), and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the BBC film Gideon's Daughter (2007). He's also known for his roles in HBO's The Girl in the Café (2006) and PBS's Page Eight (2012).
The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell, after his death in the winter of 1926–27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature which yields "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." The sculptor, a Rhode Island art student named Henry Anthony Wilcox, based the work on delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths." Frequent references to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are found in Wilcox's papers. Angell also discovers reports of mass hysteria around the world. More notes discuss a 1908 meeting of an archeological society in which New Orleans police official John Raymond Legrasse asks attendees to identify a statuette of unidentifiable greenish-black stone resembling Wilcox's sculpture. It is then revealed that the previous year, Legrasse and a party of policemen found several women and children being used in a ritual by an all-male cult. After killing five of the cultists and arresting 47 others, Legrasse learns that they worship the "Great Old Ones" and await the return of a monstrous being called Cthulhu.[2] The prisoners identify the statuette as "great Cthulhu." One of the academics present at the meeting, Princeton professor William Channing Webb, describes a group of "Esquimaux" with similar beliefs and fetishes. Thurston discovers a 1925 article from an Australian newspaper which reports the discovery of a derelict ship, the Emma, of which second mate Gustaf Johansen is the sole survivor. Johansen reports that the Emma was attacked by a heavily armed yacht named the Alert. The crewmen of the Emma killed those aboard the Alert, but lost their own ship in the battle, commandeered the Alert, and discovered an uncharted island in the vicinity of co-ordinates of 47°9′S 126°43′W. With the exception of Johansen and another man, the remaining crew died on the island. Johansen does not reveal the manner of their death. Upon traveling to Australia, Thurston views a statue retrieved from the Alert which is identical to the previous two. In Norway, he learns that Johansen died suddenly after an encounter with "two Lascar sailors". Johansen's widow provides Thurston with her late husband's manuscript, wherein the uncharted island is described as being home to a "nightmare corpse-city" called R'lyeh. Johansen's crew struggled to comprehend the non-Euclidean geometry of the city and accidentally release Cthulhu, resulting in their deaths. Johansen and one crew-mate flee aboard the Alert and are pursued by Cthulhu. Johansen rams the yacht into the creature's head, only for its injury to regenerate. The Alert escapes, but Johansen's crewmate dies. After finishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he is now a target of Cthulhu's worshippers.
