Acting

His professional stage debut was in 1976 in Quebec City, when at age 19 he appeared in The Fantasticks, Red Emma, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He relocated from Quebec to London's Centre Stage theatre company, and later played the lead in The Last Englishman with the British Actors Theatre Company. He spent two seasons with Theatr Clwyd, touring Britain in Enemy of the People and Hamlet (for which he received the Regional Theatre Best Actor award), and a season with the Chichester Festival, in Henry VIII. In Canada, he appeared over several seasons with the Shaw Festival and Stratford Festival of Canada. He gained a reputation for his performances in The Music Cure, Candida, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Vortex, Goodnight Disgrace, Henry V, and The Three Musketeers. He sang his way through the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse. Other stage performances include My Fat Friend in Los Angeles and Sleuth (with Patrick Macnee) in Toronto. In 2004, he appeared in Washington, D.C. in the title role of Cyrano de Bergerac.^[3]

In April 1996, Davies appeared as Petruchio in Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew, directed by Patrick Tucker of the Original Shakespeare Company. This three-performance run was presented as Shakespeare's own players may have done—with sparse rehearsal, eclectic costuming, and rotating roles. In Spring 1998, he appeared in the Moises Kaufmann production Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Gross Indecency earned the Garland Award for "Best Ensemble Cast from Backstage West" that year. In August 1999, he starred in Leon Pownall's one-man show An Evening with Dylan Thomas at the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Nova Scotia, Canada. The following summer he returned to the Atlantic Theatre Festival in Pownall's Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare: In the Envy of Some Greatness. August 2001 saw the completion of Pownall's Dylan Thomas trilogy with Stranger in Paradise. In mid-2002, he returned to the Stratford Festival Theatre's main stage in My Fair Lady, as Henry Higgins, a role he alternated with Colm Feore. He reprised the role of Dylan Thomas at the Festival's Studio Theatre, and returned to the Atlantic Theatre Festival in August 2003 to perform Hughie (a one-act play by Eugene O'Neill). The evening was topped off by a presentation of The Sermon by David Mamet.

In 2004, Davies performed at the Lincoln in New York City as Edmund to Christopher Plummer's King Lear. In the summer of 2004, he starred in the title role of Cyrano in Barry Kornhauser's adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., for which he won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Resident Play.^[4] The next year, in 2005, he played Dylan Thomas for seven weeks in Do Not Go Gentle at the Arclight Theatre in New York City. While there, he did a reading of Tennessee Williams's letters at the New York Public Library, and performed in a reading of Eugene O'Neill's Days Without End. In September 2005, he joined in a reading of R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island in Washington, D.C., and in October, took part in a staged reading of a new play by Austin Pendleton entitled H6R3, which blends Shakespeare's plays Henry VI and Richard III.

In 2006, he returned to The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. to perform Don Armado in Michael Kahn's 1960s version of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. Following the American run, the play moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-Upon-Avon in the UK for a limited run. He was nominated but did not win The Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor, Resident Play for Don Armado.^[4] While in D.C., he participated in a reading of London Assurance by Dion Boucicault.

Early in 2007, Davies headlined as Richard III by Shakespeare at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. He, along with friend Brent Carver, opened Toronto's CanStage production of The Elephant Man in mid-October. In 2008, he returned to Ontario's Stratford Festival to appear in Hamlet (as Polonius) and Fuente Ovejuna (as the King). He followed the Stratford season playing the Duke at the Red Bull Theater (NYC) production of Women Beware Women. He returned to Stratford in 2009, playing Duncan in Macbeth, Caesar in Julius Caesar and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the 2010 Stratford Festival season, he portrayed King Arthur in Camelot and Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor. The 2011 season featured him again in a singing role as King Arthur.

For the Stratford Festival's 60th season in 2013, Davies portrayed Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure and the Earl of Leicester in Mary Stuart. The following year, he continued at the Stratford Festival, portraying Antony in Antony & Cleopatra and the Cook in Mother Courage. For the 2015 season, he portrayed Claudius in Hamlet, and Johann Wilhelm Mobius in The Physicists. He played Prospero in The Tempest in the 2014-2015 season of The Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, D.C.^[4]

Audiobooks

He has voiced two audiobooks: Great American Suspense: Five Unabridged Classics and Great Classic Hauntings: Six Unabridged Stories.

Directing

Davies has directed several episodes of Forever Knight, Black Harbour, Pit Pony, Power Play and North of 60.^[5][6]

Music performance

In Forever Knight, Wyn Davies played the piano in the loft and co-wrote a song for the "Baby Baby" episode; he was featured in one of the selections on the first Forever Knight CD.

Davies produced a CD of his own works, Bar Talk, which is sold through his fan club with the proceeds going to a variety of charities such as Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation, Children's Hospital Foundation in Washington D.C., the Atlantic Theatre Festival of Wolfville and The Stratford Festival's Shakespeare School in Stratford, Ontario.