Age: 43
male
David Robert Dawson (born 7 September 1982) is an English actor. He has had a varied career on television, including roles in The Road to Coronation Street (2010), series 2 of Luther (2011), Ripper Street (2012–2016), The Secret Agent (2016), as King Alfred in The Last Kingdom (2015–2018) and as Joseph Merrick ("The Elephant Man") in Year of the Rabbit (2019). On stage, Dawson received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for playing Smike in the 2007 production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Other notable performances have been in the 2009 production of Comedians, the 2010 production of Posh, and the 2011 production of Luise Miller.
The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by the American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed horror stories, and the book has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. Lin Carter called it "an absolute masterpiece, probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft." There are 10 stories, the first four of which ("The Repairer of Reputations", "The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign") mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it. "The Yellow Sign" inspired a film of the same name released in 2001. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895 (316 pages).
