West was educated at Alleyn's School[8] and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he studied English literature[9][7] and was president of the Experimental Theatre Club.

[10] West originally intended to attend Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, but chose instead to focus on his career after he was cast as King Caspian in the BBC's 1989 series The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

[11] West made his London stage debut in February 1989 at the Orange Tree Theatre, playing Michael in Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles,[12] of which critic John Thaxter wrote: "He invests the role with a warmth and validity that silences sniggers that could so easily greet a lesser performance of this difficult role, and he lets us share the tumbling emotions of a juvenile torn between romantic first love and filial duty.

[17][18] During his time as artistic director, West revived the controversial The Romans in Britain,[19] and also directed As You Like It as part of the RSC's Complete Works Festival.

[27] He played Ivanov and Trigorin in the Chichester Festival Theatre's Young Chekhov Season from September 2015, alongside Nina Sosanya, Anna Chancellor, and James McArdle.

In late 2024, West returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Malvolio in Prasanna Puwanarajah's production of Twelfth Night opposite Gwyneth Keyworth, Freema Agyeman and Bally Gill.

West appeared in the film Reunion (1989) with Jason Robards and Christien Anholt as an aristocratic boy who befriends the son of a Jewish doctor in 1930s Germany.

West played the lower-middle-class clerk Leonard Bast in the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel Howards End (1992), featuring Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anthony Hopkins.

[citation needed] In voice-over, West provided the voice of Pongo in 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure, replacing Rod Taylor.

In 2004, he appeared in the year's highest rated mini-series on German television, Die Nibelungen, which was released in the United States in 2006 as Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King.

In 2010 he played Peter Scabius in the televised adaptation of William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart, while in 2011 he starred as Zak Gist in the ITV series Eternal Law.

[citation needed] West is regularly heard on radio as a reader or reciter and has performed in many radio dramas, including Otherkin by Laura Wade, Present Laughter by Noël Coward,[32] Len Deighton's Bomber, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Michael Frayn's Here, The Meaning of Zong by Giles Terera and The Homecoming as Lenny to Harold Pinter's Max.

[6][56] In 2013, West was cast in a minor role in The Riot Club, the film version of Wade's successful play, Posh, and in 2014 the couple had a daughter.

West has recorded over one hundred audiobooks, among which are the Shakespeare plays All's Well That Ends Well, Coriolanus, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II and Macbeth (directed by Steven Berkoff), the complete Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter, the Wind on Fire trilogy by William Nicholson (The Wind Singer, Slaves of the Mastery and Firesong), the Arthur trilogy by Kevin Crossley-Holland (The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places and King of the Middle March), five books by Sebastian Faulks (Charlotte Gray, Birdsong, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Human Traces and A Possible Life), four by Michael Ridpath (Trading Reality, Final Venture, Free to Trade, and The Marketmaker), two by George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Homage to Catalonia), two by Mary Wesley (An Imaginative Experience and Part of the Furniture), two by Robert Goddard (Closed Circle and In Pale Battalions) and several compilations of poetry (Realms of Gold: Letters and Poems of John Keats, Bright Star, The Collected Works of Shelley, Seven Ages, Great Narrative Poems of the Romantic Age and A Shropshire Lad).

Also Faust, Bomber, Doctor Who: The Vengeance of Morbius, Empire of the Sun, Brighton Rock, Fair Stood the Wind for France, Fluke, Great Speeches in History, How Proust Can Change Your Life, Lady Windermere's Fan, Peter Pan, The Alchemist, The Day of the Triffids, The Hairy Hands, The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, The Queen's Man, The Solitaire Mystery, The Swimming Pool Library, The Two Destinies, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Way I Found Her, The Way to Dusty Death, The Woodlanders, Under the Net, Wuthering Heights and Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales for Young and Old.

Recordings include Prokofief's Eugene Onegin with Sinfonia 21 and Edward Downes,[69] Salad Days and Walton's Henry V with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin.

[70] As a choral singer, West has participated in three Choir of London tours to Palestine: in May 2006, when he also gave poetry readings as part of the concert programme; in April 2007 when he directed The Magic Flute.

As actor As reader Samuel West has received nine AudioFile Earphones Awards for his narration: The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1996), Peter Pan by J.M.Barrie (1997), Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks (1999), The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain (2000), The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst (2007), Faust by Goethe (2011), A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman (2011), A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks (2012) and Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales for Young and Old (2013)[79] As director