| Biography | John Barrowman MBE is a Scottish-born American actor, presenter and singer. He is perhaps best known for his role as Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood, and as Malcolm Merlyn in the Arrowverse.
Barrowman moved to the US state of Illinois with his family at the age of eight. He studied performing arts at the United States International University in San Diego before landing the role of Billy Crocker in Cole Porter's Anything Goes in London's West End. Since his debut, he has played lead roles in various musicals both in the West End and on Broadway, including Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, and Matador. After appearing in Sam Mendes' production of The Fix, he was nominated for the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical and, in the early 2000s, returned to the role of Billy Crocker in the revival of Anything Goes. His most recent West End credit was in the 2009 production of La Cage aux Folles.
Barrowman is featured on more than 12 musical theatre recordings, including cover tunes found on his 2007 album Another Side and 2008's Music Music Music. Both albums accrued places on the UK Albums Chart, as did his self-titled John Barrowman (2010), which reached No. 11, his highest chart placing to date. He has published two memoirs and autobiographies, Anything Goes (2008) and I Am What I Am (2009), with his older sister Carole as co-author. The siblings also teamed up to write a series of young-adult fantasy novels, Hollow Earth. The second book in the series, Bone Quill, was released 2013, with the third, Book of Beasts published in 2014. A second trilogy, The Orion Chronicles, followed with Conjuror published in 2016, Nephilim in 2017, and Inquisitor in 2018. |