After a Quaker education at Leighton Park in Reading, Hoyland started out in a short film titled You're Human Like The Rest of Them in 1967.
After several small roles in well-known series, such as "Budgie", Z-Cars and Coronation Street, he appeared in five episodes of the 1976 television mini-series Bill Brand, as Sandiford.
Hoyland had a brief role in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only as McGregor, a military officer serving as caretaker of a classified device aboard the spy ship St. Georges.
In 1974, he joined the Joint Stock Theatre Company and found success playing Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Nuremberg and Donald Rumsfeld in Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.
In 2016, the year before his death, he acted in A Month of Sundays, a play written by Robert Larbey and set in an old folk's home.