THE man growling down the phone line is Peter Elliott.

He is not angry, merely demonstrating his affinity for aping animal behaviour, in this case the menace of Shere Khan, the tiger.

Such is his prowess that his Internet Movie Database biography introduces him as “the film industry’s primary primate”.

Peter’s expertise can be seen in York from Tuesday in the animal movements of the Birmingham Stage Company cast for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book at the Grand Opera House.

Should you have seen Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Gorillas In The Mist or Congo, you were watching the 5ft 4in Peter Elliott at work, creating and playing monkeys in the films.

For the Birmingham company, he has directed the movements of the bear, tiger, monkey and wolf-pack characters in a series of four half-day workshops.

“The Jungle Book has been a completely different experience for me. It’s a fun show, you haven’t got the pressure you have in a film,” says Peter, going on to highlight his main challenge.

“Being on all fours doesn’t lend itself to bursting into song, so we tried to strip away as much of the ‘animal’ as possible to give the actors the freedom to sing and dance but still retain the essence of the animal.

“If you study a tiger prowling, you will see that while they prowl they keep their eyes on you all the time, so we found that if you did that, you had the essence of their movement.”

Peter has always enjoyed physical pursuits, whether boxing for England at the age of 12 and 13, or competing nationally in high diving, cliff diving, karate and gymnastics, or starting up his own acrobatic troupe after leaving school at 16.

“We only did it for one season, going round the country fairs with a team of my own for the summer, probably about ten of us,” he says.

Nevertheless those acrobatic skills came in handy in helped Peter to acquire his Equity card 30 years ago. “I played a drunken acrobatic waiter in a can-can routine in the West End in one of those dreadful, dreadful places called The Cockney Cabaret, where they bus in thousands of people.

“To get the Equity card, you had to hold auditions to prove that 30 people couldn’t do what I could, and that meant choreographing something that only I could do twice a night.”

Peter had trained in clowning and method acting, heading to North Yorkshire to study with East 15 Acting School at Sheriff Hutton (where he later held his marriage ceremony in 1994), and his movement skills eventually led him to work in Los Angeles on the Warner Brothers film Greystoke, after observing animals at London Zoo.

“I was only 21 and had a massive budget of $750,000 for R & D – I didn’t even know what that was; it’s research and development – and I don’t think I spent it all. I didn’t know how to,” says Peter, who studied the chimpanzee colony at the University of Oklahoma for six months with American primatologist Dr Roger Foutts.

He has never looked back, developing his skills as an animal movement director and in the use of animatronic suits, clocking up credits on 200 commercials and 50 movies, and teaching animal study at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama.

Coming next is a Bollywood movie. “They’re spending a million dollars on one animal suit – but there’ll be no animal dancing,” he says.

Birmingham Stage Company presents The Jungle Book, Grand Opera House, York, Tuesday to Saturday.

* Box office: 0844 847 2322 or grandoperahouseyork.org.uk