Monte Markham- Actor, Director, Filmmaker
While enjoying a substantial career as a versatile, award winning actor/director/writer in feature motion pictures, television, and on Broadway, in 1992, Monte, with his son Jason Markham and wife Klaire Markham, founded their independent production company, “Perpetual Motion Films”. The rest is history.
With innovative style and high production quality, they immediately hit the ground running, producing 26 hours of programming for US News and the A&E Network. Quickly evolving as a multi-disciplined “can-do” company, they expanded production and were soon filming multi-hour documentaries and series programming on locations all over the world. Monte has produced, directed, narrated, and appeared as on-camera host for over 150 hours of documentary films for network television, launching The History Channel with their 35-hour series, The Great Ships, and 10 premiere “Epic” Biographies that inaugurated A&E’s landmark Biography series. Today, with over 2,000 biographies on Amazon, his Michelangelo remains among the all time best sellers.
From the Amazon to the Arctic, filming on every kind of commercial and military machine that floats, flies, races, or dives, Monte’s producer/director assignments have taken him from carrier landings and launches, ground zero at the World Trade Center, 30 below on the Greenland Icepack, to the most intimate levels of culture, peoples, and governments in China, Japan, the UK, Europe, Russia, Brazil, India, Africa, and the US.
He was the first Westerner to use an all-Chinese crew for his 2,000 mile journey up the Yangtze for China’s Great Dam, filming the Dam construction, the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, and the Forbidden City. For The Imperial Japanese Navy, with an all- Japanese crew,he achieved unprecedented access to historical, sacred, and controversial locations, and was invited to film on board the 75 ship Grand Review with Premier Koizumi. For The Russian Navy, Monte was the first American to film the Russian Typhoon Class Submarine – the world’s largest – at its secret base in the Arctic Circle.
With Prince Andrew as Host, Prince Phillip at Greenwich, on locations at Windsor, Portsmouth, and throughout the UK, he produced and directed the 4 hour Royal Navy.
Throughout his years of non-stop world-wide production, Monte found little opportunity to accept acting offers. In 2009, deciding it was time to wind down a full time, aggressive production schedule, he resumed his acting career – and has found a whole new world of opportunity.
