Christopher Timothy

Christopher Timothy is a British actor and narrator born on 14 October 1940 in Bala, Wales. He is the son of Anglican priest and BBC announcer Andrew Timothy and his first wife, Gwladys Marian née Hailstone. At the age of five, Timothy relocated with his family to south London, and at thirteen moved again to Shrewsbury, where he attended Kingsland Grange Preparatory School and Priory Grammar School for Boys. He subsequently trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Before securing his first paid acting work, he held a job at a hat shop in Shrewsbury.

Timothy's professional stage career began with Chips with Everything, in which he played a RAF military policeman. The production ran in both London and New York, with Timothy in the role for more than six months. His Broadway appearance came in 1963. Following that engagement, he became a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company during the 1960s, appearing in productions including The Master Builder, Juno and the Paycock, and Olivier's Othello.

His film work during the late 1960s and early 1970s included Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), Alfred the Great (1969), The Virgin Soldiers (1969), Spring and Port Wine (1970), The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), Up the Chastity Belt (1971), and Eskimo Nell (1975). In 1980, he took on the role of Jesus Christ in the York Mystery Plays.

Timothy's television career began with the 1969 series Take Three Girls. He subsequently appeared in the UFO episode "The Psychobombs" in 1970, Doctor at Large in 1971, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em in 1973, and Murder Most English: A Flaxborough Chronicle in 1977. His most prominent television role came in 1978, when he was cast as James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small. He remained with the series for all 90 episodes, through 1990. Timothy later recalled that author Alf Wight spoke with a soft, lilting Scottish accent, though Timothy was instructed to keep his own speech neutral to preserve the universality of the character. He also narrated the audio books of the James Herriot series.

In 2000, Timothy was cast as Mac McGuire in the BBC One daytime soap opera Doctors, a role he held for six years and during which he also directed some episodes. That same year he was the subject of This Is Your Life, when host Michael Aspel surprised him on the set of Doctors at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. In 2004, he appeared in Casualty as the murderer of long-standing character Finlay Newton, and in 2009 he made a guest appearance in The Bill, broadcast on New Year's Day. Further television credits include Lewis in the episode "Wild Justice," The Grapes of Wrath, All the Fun of the Fair, Haunting Julia, and a 2014 appearance in Casualty. He also appeared in Midsomer Murders Series 21, Episode 1, "The Point of Balance," as Ned Barnaby, and in Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators in the episode "The Sticking Place" as Major Terence Benedick. In April 2017, he joined the BBC One primetime soap opera EastEnders as the regular character Ted Murray, making his final appearance in the role on 27 September 2019.

In 2018 and 2019, Timothy appeared alongside Peter Davison in two series of Great British Car Journeys for Channel 4. He narrated the first nine series of Channel 5's The Yorkshire Vet, which follows veterinarians Julian Norton and Peter Wright, but was unable to continue into the tenth series due to self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020, at which point Peter Davison assumed the narrating role.

Timothy's voice work has been a consistent thread throughout his career. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had been the announcer for The Goon Show in the early 1950s, Timothy took on the announcer role for the Goon Again Show in 2001, marking the programme's 50th anniversary. He also played the announcer on The Kinks' 1974 double album Preservation Act 2. During the 1970s, he appeared in television commercials for The Sun newspaper, a period that later became the basis for a character in the 2017 stage production Ink, a play about Rupert Murdoch's entry into British newspaper publishing. Timothy was represented as a character in that production, played by Jack Holden at the Almeida Theatre and by Andrew Durand in the Broadway run. He appeared in BBC Radio's Just a Minute in 1988 and 1989, and in 2011 played himself in the audio drama We Are Not the BBC, written by Susan Casanove and produced by the Wireless Theatre Company.

Timothy returned to the stage in March 2013 in The Living Room, and in 2014 toured the United Kingdom in the stage thriller Dial M for Murder, playing Inspector Hubbard. In 2008, he took part in the BBC Wales programme Coming Home, which explored his Welsh family history.

In his personal life, Timothy was first married to Susan Boys, with whom he had four sons and two daughters. He has been married to Annie Veronica Swatton since 1982, and they have one daughter together. He is a supporter of Hartlepool United and learned to play violin while at school, occasionally performing with a local amateur orchestra.