Biography

Neil and his three brothers, Steve, John, and Danny were put into separate children's homes when Neil was ten, because a court decided that their parents could no longer look after them. When he was sixteen he had to leave the care home he had lived in for six years, but in order to stay at school to complete his A-levels (which he needed for his ambition to go on to drama school) he advertised on his school noticeboard for a foster family to look after him. Some friends of his parents offered to foster him, and he lived with them for 18 months, allowing him to gain a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He moved down to London and shared a house with actor Charles Lawson amongst others. To this day, he is still close with Charles.

[August 2009] When a catering and property company that he owns became insolvent, he entered into an individual voluntary agreement to pay back his creditors from his earnings over the following three years, rather than declare himself bankrupt which would have resulted in his creditors getting very little of their money back.

Graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983, where his flatmates were Richard Huw, Adrian Dunbar and Charles Lawson.

In 2009 he took a break from acting to run a pub, The Punch Bowl Inn in Marton-cum-Grafton, near Boroughbridge in North Yorkshire.

Was considered as a replacement for Michael Praed when Praed left the TV series, Robin Hood (1984), but lost out to Jason Connery.