Alan Hugh Dale (born 6 May 1947) is a New Zealand actor. As a child, Dale enjoyed theatre and rugby. After retiring from the sport, he took on a number of occupations, before deciding to become a professional actor at age 27. Dale subsequently moved to Australia, where he played Dr. John Forrest in The Young Doctors from 1979 to 1982. He later appeared as Jim Robinson in Neighbours, a part he played from 1985 until 1993. He left the series when he fell out with the producers over the pay he and the rest of the cast received.
After leaving Neighbours, Dale found he had become typecast as Jim Robinson in Australia and struggled to find work. His career was revitalised after he relocated to the United States in 2000. Since then, he has had roles in many American series including prominent parts in The O.C. (as Caleb Nichol) and Ugly Betty (as Bradford Meade), as well as recurring and guest roles in Lost, 24, NCIS, ER, The West Wing, The X-Files, Entourage and Once Upon a Time. From 2017 to 2021, Dale starred in the soap opera Dynasty as Joseph Anders. Dale has also appeared in minor roles in films such as Star Trek: Nemesis, Hollywood Homicide, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as well as the London West End production of Spamalot. Dale has been married to former Miss Australia Tracey Pearson since 1990 and has four children.
Early life and work
Dale was born on 6 May 1947 in Dunedin, New Zealand. One of four children, Dale enjoyed his childhood, but his family was relatively poor. Growing up in New Zealand without television, Dale loved rugby union, the theatre and amateur dramatics. His first performance was for a school concert, at the age of 13, doing an impression of comedian Shelley Berman. After moving northwards, his parents became founding members of an amateur theatre in Onehunga, Auckland called 'The Little Dolphin Theatre'. Dale often operated the stage equipment used to produce weather effects,
Dale was a skilled rugby player, but opted to move into drama instead because "the acting fraternity didn't like footballers and the footballers didn't like actors. [...] Acting gave me the same buzz and there was the chance of a longer career." He gave up rugby at the age of 21 because it was not considered a workable career at the time, and he had to support his family. Acting roles were limited in New Zealand so Dale worked in multiple jobs, including as a male model, a car salesman and a realtor. While working as a milkman he heard the disc jockey at his local radio station resign during a broadcast. Dale went over to the station and told the managers he could do a better job. They gave him a trial and then signed him up for the afternoon show. At the age of 27, he decided to become a professional actor.
Acting career
Early roles and Neighbours Dale's first professional acting job was playing an Indian in a production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the Grafton Theatre in Auckland. His first on-screen role came as radio station manager Jack Delamore in the New Zealand television drama Radio Waves in 1978. The show was not successful, running for a single season, but Dale described it as "nine months of solid work and great fun." In the late 1970s, Dale moved to Australia at the age of 32, due to the limited acting work in New Zealand. He applied to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, but was rejected because he "was a lot older than anybody else on the course." He was soon cast as Dr. John Forrest in the Australian soap opera The Young Doctors, where he remained for three-and-a-half years until 1982.
In January 1985, Dale was cast in the continuing role of Jim Robinson in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, one of the twelve original characters conceived by the show's creator Reg Watson.Mercado 2004, p.202. He was appearing in a small role in the series Possession when he was offered the part of Jim by producer John Holmes.Haywood 1991, p.159. He replaced actor Robin Harrison, who had originally been cast in the role and had already filmed some scenes before his contract negotiations broke down. The scenes featuring Harrison's performance were re-shot with Dale.Oram 1988, p.108. The character had intrigued Dale, who thought that parts of Jim's life echoed his own life at the time. He said "It's like it was written for me. It's a great role and naturally it's one I can really relate to. You have to be fairly similar to a character you play, otherwise you'd go insane." Dale chose to relocate from Sydney to Melbourne, where Neighbours was filmed, but commuted between the two cities for some time while he was still appearing on Possession.
He found working on Neighbours "exciting" and it enabled him to provide for his sons, but has spoken negatively about the show's producers, stating: "You were a totally replaceable commodity; [the production company] didn't put any value on any of the people appearing in the show." Dale appeared on the show from the first episode and stayed for eight years before his character was killed off in 1993, appearing in 1064 episodes. Dale quit the show due to feeling he and the rest of the cast were underpaid, and said he parted on "bad terms" with the production company Grundy Television. He expanded: "I didn't like it there, they were not nice people. When we decided that we hated each other, the company and me, one of the things the company did was to market everything they could out of us and pay us nothing." In 2018, Dale returned to Neighbours to film scenes for two episodes, which aired in December 2018 and March 2019, in each of which he appeared as Jim in a dream to Jim's son Paul. Of his return, Dale stated that it had "laid a load of ghosts to rest for me", regarding his original exit.
After Neighbours, Dale struggled to find work in Australia because he was typecast as Jim Robinson. His only regular sources of income were voice-overs, and publishing magazines about his former show which he "made quite a lot of money out of". He lost most of his profits investing in a failed children's magazine. Dale did have some minor acting roles during this time, including a single episode appearance in science-fiction show Time Trax (1994) and the pilot episode of Space: Above and Beyond (1995), the latter of which was an American series filmed in Australia. In 1999, he was cast in the American television film First Daughter, which was also filmed in Australia. After discovering he could perform a convincing American accent, Dale attended the film's premiere, finally moving with his family to the United States permanently in January 2000. Dale, his second wife Tracey, and their then two-year-old son Nick moved into an "awful little flat" in Los Angeles and found an agent. Dale recalled telling his wife in Melbourne that "there's no way this is going to work. But if it does, it proves you can do anything."
Wider success
At the age of 52, he began to revive his career and started taking acting classes, something he had not thought about after being cast in Neighbours. He described his age, unknown status and willingness to work for a relatively low fee as being his main assets for getting work in America. His drama teacher, with whom he has remained ever since, told him "that you might want to play great roles, but truth is you will get cast as a specific type. Just work out your type. The others in the class said I was a bit Anthony Hopkins and a bit Sean Connery and that went into my head. I thought if I go for roles those guys would go for I'm more likely to get them." The first role he was offered was a part in a series called Sign of Life, a show about a rock band, which eventually fell through. Dale only received a couple of auditions during his first year in America, but his break came when he was cast as South African patient Al Patterson in four episodes of the medical drama ER between 2000 and 2001.
Following this, Dale saw a substantial increase in work, being described by The Times in 2008 as "busier than ever". Over the next two decades, Dale made appearances in numerous American and British television series. These included guest roles on The Lone Gunmen in 2001, The Practice in 2002, The West Wing in two episodes between 2002 and 2003 as Commerce Secretary Mitch Bryce, as well as appearing in three episodes, including the series finale, of The X-Files, playing the "Toothpick Man" in 2002. He played the recurring role of Vice President of the United States James Prescott for seven episodes of the second season of 24 in 2003, reprising the part in one episode of season three the following year. The character was originally supposed to appear in just a single scene, with a member of the casting team later telling Dale that they likely would have cast an actor more well known that he was at the time, had they realised how big the role would end up being. He also voiced the character in the video adaptation 24: The Game in 2006. Dale played NCIS Director Tom Morrow in two episodes of JAG in 2003, which served as a backdoor pilot for crime series NCIS, on which he reprised the role on recurring basis until its third season. He returned for several appearances between the show's tenth and thirteenth seasons.
He starred in the Fox TV series, The O.C. from 2003 to 2005, playing Caleb Nichol, a wealthy tycoon. The producers saw that the character had further potential and made his initially recurring role part of the main cast in the series. After 35 appearances, Caleb was killed off in the second-season episode "The O.Sea". Dale was disappointed that Caleb was written out and described it as a mistake by the production staff. In 2006, Dale was cast in the starring role of Bradford Meade, the owner of Meade Publications in the ABC show Ugly Betty. Although he impressed the producers in his audition, he initially lost the role to a "bigger star". After said star began "causing trouble" and was fired, Dale was given the part. Bradford was killed off during the show's second season. As part of the cast, Dale was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series in 2007 and 2008. Dale appeared in the second-season finale of Lost, "Live Together, Die Alone", as Charles Widmore, a businessman and leader of the Others. Dale's publicist was initially worried that Widmore (who was an integral part of the show's mystery) would become a starring role, meaning it would be hard for Dale to appear in both Lost and Ugly Betty at the same time. The part remained a recurring role, with Dale appearing numerous times throughout the remainder of the show's run, between seasons two (2006) and six (2010). He enjoyed the role but often found it difficult due to his character's unclear motivation. Dale was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Guest Starring Role on Television for his performance in 2008.
Dale had recurring roles in the British serial Midnight Man and the Australian series Sea Patrol in 2008, as well as on Undercovers and the British series Moving Wallpaper as a fictional version of himself. He played John Ellis, the fictional owner of Warner Bros., on several episodes of Entourage between 2008 and 2011, and also reprised the role in the film adaptation in 2015. Dale also had a recurring role as King George in the series Once Upon a Time, and Emmett in Hot in Cleveland. Dale's other guest roles include: Torchwood in 2008, Californication in 2011, The Mindy Project in 2013, and Homeland in 2017. He was part of the main cast of Dominion, which ran for single season in 2014, playing General Edward Riesen.