Toby Jones tops off varied acting career with OBE in the New Year Honours

Few contemporary actors boast a career as diverse or consistently acclaimed as Toby Jones.

Equally at home portraying the villainous Culverton Smith in Sherlock as voicing Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter film series, Jones has been made an OBE for services to drama in the New Year Honours.

The Bafta-winner broke through with an acclaimed portrayal of author Truman Capote in the 2006 biopic Infamous and soon racked up credits in a variety of features, from political drama Frost/Nixon to spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and young adult fantasy The Hunger Games.

Jones, 54, was born on September 7 1966 in Hammersmith, London, to actor parents. His two brothers both also went on to work in theatre and film.

He attended Abingdon School in Oxfordshire in the 1980s and studied drama at the University of Manchester.

In 1992, he made his film debut with a minor role in Sally Potter’s experimental take on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton.

He balanced stage and screen work until 2006 when he starred as Capote in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, although his performance was overshadowed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn as the author in 2005’s Capote.

Jones then appeared in a number of hit films including The Hunger Games and St Trinian’s.

His other notable credits from this period include roles in the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist in 2007 and a 2010 feature in a Doctor Who episode as the evil Dream Lord.

In 2017, he portrayed the villainous serial killer Smith in The Lying Detective, an episode of the BBC’s Sherlock.

The next year, he played dinosaur auctioneer Mr Eversoll in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the fifth instalment of the series.

And in 2018 he won the best male comedy Bafta for his role in the BBC series Detectorists – an unlikely hit about the lives of metal detecting enthusiasts Andy and Lance.

Jones and his wife Karen were together for 25 years before marrying in 2015.