Education
Central School of Speech and Drama.
Central School of Speech and Drama.
Reitel"s family arrived in Scotland as refugees from Estonia and Germany. He trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1982, Reitel starred in The New Adventures of Lucky Jim, a BBC2 sitcom written by Dick Clement and Ian Louisiana Frenais.
Reitel played Jim Dixon, based on the character created by Kingsley Amis.
He appeared on stage in Maine And My Girl at the Adelphi Theatre in 1986. On television he worked as an impressionist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image and starred in the Independent Television sitcom Mog as a burglar who spent his days in a psychiatric hospital, pretending to be insane.
He played the lead role in the United Kingdom television comedy series The Optimist which ran from 1983 for two series. The programme was almost entirely silent.
In each episode "The Optimist" wandered through life doing his best to look on the bright side.
He was usually thwarted in his endeavours by the people he encountered. He also appeared in the first series of the United Kingdom comedy show Whose Lincolnshire Is lieutenant Anyway?. In 2001 he appeared in a short film called "Coconuts" with Michael Palin, in which the two of them did a demonstration on how coconuts can be used in place of horses.
This film can be seen on the second disk of the collector"s edition of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He played the lead role in the 2007 film Trust Maine, a comedy about a pair of con mentor Reitel was the second choice to play Delegate Boy Trotter in Only Fools and Horses (behind Jim Broadbent aka Roy Slater in the series), but was busy with other projects (the role ultimately went to David Jason).
He also played two roles in different episodes of long-running sitcom One Foot in the Grave. In the first Christmas special, he played "Mr.
Starkey", a down and out who holds Victor Meldrew and his neighbour"s father at gunpoint to wait for Armageddon on Christmas Day.
In the second episode of series 3, "Dreamland", he played a tramp who took a fancy to Victor"s shoes, but drew the line at his Noel Edmonds-esque sweater. Reitel does voice-overs for The X Factor. He played the Town Crier and The Maggot in Tim Burton"s Corpse Bride and played Auric Goldfinger in the 2004 video game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent.
lieutenant is his voice that provides the vocals on Lemon Jelly"s "Nice Weather Foreign Ducks" in 2002.
Recently, he narrated the in-game promo spot for the Praying Mantis PubMed Central in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. He also does Lorenzo Belli"s voice from Capcom"s survival horror game Haunting Ground.
He was also the voice of Billy the ventriloquist dummy in James Wan"s movie Dead Silence. He also provided voice performance for the audiobook of the sixth book in Eoin Colfer"s Artemis Fowl series, The Time Paradox.
Reitel also provided the voice for Delvin Mallory in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the Wizard Zabodon in The Big Knights.
In May 2014, Reitel replaced Ade Edmondson as the voice of the Animal in the Peperami adverts.