He was best known for his portrayal of the British Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire and for playing Billy Flynn in the original West End production of the musical Chicago.
While his father was a member of the Church of England, Cross grew up in his Irish mother's Catholic faith,[3] in the Tulse Hill neighbourhood of London.
[5] After graduating from RADA, Cross performed in several stage plays at The Dukes theatre in Lancaster where he was seen in Macbeth, The Importance of Being Earnest and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
[6] Cross's first big-screen film appearance came in 1976 when he went on location to Deventer, Netherlands, to play Trooper Binns in Joseph E. Levine's Second World War epic A Bridge Too Far, which starred an international cast, including Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Michael Caine and James Caan.
Cross's path to international stardom began in 1978 with his performance in the musical Chicago, in which he played Billy Flynn, the slick lawyer of murderess Roxie Hart.
The film was based on the true story of two athletes in the 1924 Olympics: Eric Liddell, a devout Scottish Christian, and Harold Abrahams, an English Jew who runs to overcome prejudice.
[8] Cross's starring role in Chariots of Fire has been credited with continuing a transatlantic trend in elegant young English actors that had been set by Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited.
[11] In 1982, the U.S. union Actors' Equity, in a landmark reversal of a previous ruling, allowed Cross to appear in John Guare's off-Broadway play Lydie Breeze.
[16] In 1985, he played Barney Greenwald in a revival of Herman Wouk's courtroom drama The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial at the Queen's Theatre, London, alongside castmates Charlton Heston (as Captain Queeg) and John Schuck.
[17][18] In a 1985 interview, the actor admitted he preferred American roles because of their emotionalism, saying of English acting: "Over here, people hide behind mannerism and technique and don't come up with any soul.
"[5] Cross expressed the hope that his reputation would "span the Atlantic," and that those in the industry would not ignore him because he did not live in Los Angeles or New York City.
In the 1988 HBO spy film Steal the Sky he played Munir Redfa, an Iraqi pilot blackmailed into flying a MiG aircraft from Iraq to Israel.
He twice portrayed a vampire, first in the 1989 USA Network film Nightlife, then again as Barnabas Collins in the 1991 MGM remake of the cult classic TV soap opera Dark Shadows.
In 2005, Cross, an anti-death penalty campaigner, starred as a death-row prisoner in Bruce Graham's play Coyote on a Fence, at the Duchess Theatre.
He wrote music, screenplays, and articles for English-language publications, and the lyrics for an album with Bulgarian singer Vasil Petrov, which was released in late 2007.
[24] The nom de guerre for the performance had occurred to Cross when he recalled an earlier involvement with the music industry as a session singer for Decca Records between 1972 and 1974.
[29]: 18 In this capacity he took part in the ceremonial tercentenary event at the Royal Albert Hall on 31 October 2017, celebrating three hundred years since the formation of the first English Grand Lodge, in which a dramatic presentation starred various actors, led by Sir Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond, and Sanjeev Bhaskar.