On May 30, 1940, Ackroyd was born in East Orange, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark; he moved to Wayne, New Jersey when he was 12 years old.

On Broadway, Ackroyd appeared in Unlikely Heroes, a 1971 production of three plays based on the stories of Philip Roth; and Children of a Lesser God, in which he replaced John Rubinstein as the lead character, James Leeds, in 1981. Since the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Ackroyd has narrated documentary television series like History’s Mysteries and UFO Files: “Alien Engineering”.

Ackroyd moved to Montana in 1996. In 2003, he co-founded the Alpine Theatre Project in Whitefish, a professional acting company, of which he is the Artistic Development Director. The project has featured appearances by such notable performers as Olympia Dukakis, John Lithgow and Kelli O’Hara.