He starred as the father, Edward, in the three part ITV supernatural series HIM. He took over from Fay Ripley as lead DCI in completely improvised show Suspects as DCI Daniel Drummond, which aired 3 to 31 August 2016 (all six episodes). James appeared in one episode (ep.3 Dead Air) of the third series which aired 27 June 2015. The second series of Defiance started production in August, 2013 in Toronto and continued until December 2013. He was cast as Mayor Niles Pottinger, the new Mayor of Defiance. In the US James was a lead in the CBS spy caper series CHAOS from 2010 to 2011. He had a role in Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a comic fantasy series for Comedy Central and BBC Two, which began airing in April 2009. Murray had the leading role of the father, Frank Davis, in It's Alive (2008) a remake of the '70s horror classic by Larry Cohen.
Murray starred in the ITV science fiction series Primeval as Stephen Hart, Nick Cutter's lab technician, in both series one (2007) and series two (2008). He also found more permanent roles in Channel 4's 20 Things to Do Before You're 30 (2003) playing Glen and BBC One's season four of Cutting It (2005) as Liam Carney.
Murray found fame in Primeval (ITV 2008) as expert tracker Stephen Hart, and in Cucumber ( Channel 4 2015) as conflicted character Daniel Coltrane.Įarlier on in his career he starred in a series of both film and television pieces, including the comedy series Roger-Roger (1999), legal drama series North Square (2000), mini series Other People's Children (2000) and Sons & Lovers (2003), a Granada production of The Sittaford Mystery (2006) as Charles Burnaby, a film of the Thomas Hardy story Under the Greenwood Tree (2005) as Dick Dewy, plus earlier films Nailing Vienna (2002) as Peter, All the King's Men (1999) as Pvt Will Needham, and Phoenix Blue (2001) as Rick.
His great-grandfather, Richard Hollins Murray, invented the reflecting lens in 1927. He was awarded a classics scholarship by Malvern College, and has a degree in film. Murray eventually accumulated 3,500,000 quotations sent in by contributors, each on an individual slip of paper.Murray was born in Manchester. Each day Murray received 1000 quotations from contributors to the A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Anything addressed to ‘Mr Murray, Oxford’ would always find its way to him, and such was the volume of post sent by Murray and his team that the Post Office erected a special post box outside Murray’s house.
There Murray had a second corrugated iron Scriptorium lined with bookshelves and 1,029 pigeon-holes for quotation slips built in the back garden- a larger building than the first, with more storage space for the ever-increasing number of slips being sent to Murray and his team.
In the summer of 1884, Murray and his family moved to a large house on the Banbury Road in north Oxford. In 1882 Scottish lexicographer and philologist James Murray, working in a corrugated out-building on the grounds of Mill Hill School, in Mill Hill, London called "The Scriptorium, " began the process of accumulating and organizing the data for what became known as the Oxford English Dictionary.