James Downs(IV)
- Actor
- Producer
James Downs was born in Glasgow and was executive producer on Borley Rectory (2017) and also appeared in the film as the Camera Loader. He is a writer and archivist in the University of Exeter's Special Collections Department, also home to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum - where he previously worked for almost a decade - and the biographer of film and theatre actor Anton Walbrook. He has written and presented conference papers about Walbrook on several occasions as well as being interviewed at the actor's grave for the 'Life and Death in Hampstead Sound Trail' and curating the 2013 exhibition 'Anton Walbrook - Star and Enigma.' In addition to teaching film adaptation and cataloguing archival material relating to other German émigrés, he has written two books and over thirty articles on a range of topics relating to the history of film and photography, visual culture and religious history, and since 2018 he has been the editor of the magazine 'Photographica World.' Published books include 'A Carnal Medium: fin-de-siècle essays on the photographic nude' (Portsmouth: Callum James Books, 2012), 'Joseph Pike: the happy artist' (Kibworth: Matador, 2017) and 'Anton Walbrook. A Life of Masks and Mirrors' (Oxford: Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020.)