He was appointed the joint artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre, with the West End impresario Duncan Weldon in 1995 for a three-year tenure. As an actor at Chichester he also starred in four plays, including his first "Uncle Vanya" in 1996 (he played it again in 2000, bringing the Chekhov play to Broadway for a limited run). Jacobi's work during the 1990s included the 13-episode series TV adaptation of the novels by Ellis Peters, "Cadfael" (1994–1998) and a televised version of "Breaking the Code" (1996). Film appearances of the era included performances in Kenneth Branagh's "Dead Again" (1991), Branagh's full-text rendition of "Hamlet" (1996) as King Claudius, John Maybury's "" (1998), a portrait of painter Francis Bacon, as Senator Gracchus in "Gladiator" (2000) with Russell Crowe, and as "The Duke" opposite Christopher Eccleston and Eddie Izzard in a post-apocalyptic version of Thomas Middleton's "The Revenger's Tragedy" (2002).