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Alan Scarfe

Alan Scarfe was a British-Canadian actor whose screen work carried the weight of a career built in classical theatre. Born in Harpenden, England, on June 8, 1946, he trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art from 1964 to 1966 before beginning his professional life on the stage. Scarfe went on to perform more than 100 major theatrical roles across Europe, Canada and the United States. His repertoire included King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Brutus, Cassius, Prospero, Petruchio, Cyrano de Bergerac and Doctor Faustus. He spent eight seasons at Canada’s Stratford Festival and two at the Shaw Festival, developing the kind of authority and precision that served him equally well in television and film. He also directed for the stage, working with material by Shakespeare, Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, among others. On television, Scarfe found a substantial recurring role in Seven Days as Dr. Bradley Talmadge, the NSA member who directed operations for the Backstep Project. Science-fiction audiences may also know him from Star Trek, where he played two different Romulan characters in The Next Generation and Magistrate Augris in the Voyager episode “Resistance.” In 2003, he appeared alongside his son Jonathan in Burn: The Robert Wraight Story. Scarfe’s career eventually expanded beyond acting and directing. After returning to Canada from Los Angeles in 2002, he began writing novels under the pseudonym Clanash Farjeon, an anagram of his full name. Those books were later revised and republished under his own name. The Vampires of Juarez received the 2018 BIBA Star, The Revelation of Jack the Ripper won the 2019 Best Indie Book Award, and The Mask of the Holy Spirit received the 2020 BIBA for Satire. Across stage, screen and fiction, Scarfe’s work was marked by an appetite for demanding characters, political ideas and morally complicated worlds. He died in 2024.