Rich Swingle is an award winning actor, who has performed and/or taught on six continents, in 41 nations and in hundreds of venues. He received the Audience Choice Actor of the Year Award at the 2021 International Christian Film Festival. Most of his international travel has been with a dozen one-man plays he has written or helped develop: I Dreamed I Was Free, Big Fish Little Worm, The Revelation, The Acts, Alien Immigration Training, Views of the Manger, Five Bells for 9/11, Journey to the Garden, Paradise Lost, God of Hope, Shepherds Reflect on the 23rd Psalm, and Beyond the Chariots, which he's performed Off-Broadway, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (the largest arts festival in the world), in LA, Toronto, Hong Kong, Shangai, Transylvania, and in Beijing, Vancouver, Singapore, London, Paris while those cities hosted the Olympics.
Rich has been immersed in the life of Eric Liddell since 2000 when Liddell's niece Peggy Judge gave him a tour of the Eric Liddell Centre in Edinburgh, where he pored through family photos and out-of-print biographies. The Edinburgh Fringe performances were in the lunchroom where Eric Liddell ate his meals at the University of Edinburgh. It was transformed into a theatre space, and it was 100m from Liddell's dorm room and 100m from McEwan Hall, where Liddell graduated. Rich's performances have also taken him to Le Stade de Colombes in Paris, where Liddell broke the world record, and to Tientsin, China, and a track Liddell designed, the home where he lived and a church where he preached. He's interviewed people that remember Liddell on four continents, including all three of Liddell's daughters, two of his wife's siblings, one of his students, and numerous people who were interned with him in China.
