Robert Hardy

Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy was born on 29 October 1925 in Cheltenham, England, to Henry Harrison Hardy, MBE, headmaster of Cheltenham College and later Shrewsbury School, and Edith Jocelyn, daughter of the Reverend Sydney Dugdale. Hardy was educated at Rugby School before attending Magdalen College, Oxford, where his studies were interrupted by service in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He trained as a pilot, receiving part of his instruction through the British Flying Training School Program in Terrell, Texas. After the war he returned to Oxford and completed a BA with Honours in English, studying under C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He died on 3 August 2017 at Denville Hall, a home for retired actors, at the age of 91.

Hardy's stage career brought him to Broadway during the 1956–1957 season, where he appeared in the play Someone Waiting and the comedy Four Winds. His origins in Gloucestershire, England, informed a classical theatrical foundation that he carried throughout his career. In the late 1950s he appeared in a minor role opposite Glenn Ford in the 1958 war film Torpedo Run, and in 1959 he played the King of France in a production of All's Well That Ends Well directed by Tyrone Guthrie at Stratford-upon-Avon, alongside Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg. That same year he appeared as Sicinius opposite Laurence Olivier in Peter Hall's production of Coriolanus at Stratford-upon-Avon, a cast that also included Ian Holm, Vanessa Redgrave, Diana Rigg, and Albert Finney. He subsequently performed in Shakespeare's Henry V on stage and portrayed the role in the BBC television series An Age of Kings in 1960, later playing Coriolanus in The Spread of the Eagle for the BBC in 1963 and Sir Toby Belch in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night in 1980.

On television, Hardy's first continuing series role was as businessman Alec Stewart in the BBC oil company drama The Troubleshooters, which he played from 1966 to 1970. He earned further recognition for his portrayal of the mentally unstable Abwehr Sergeant Gratz in LWT's 1969 war drama Manhunt. In 1975 he played Albert, Prince Consort, in the thirteen-hour serial Edward the Seventh. His most sustained television success came with the long-running BBC series All Creatures Great and Small, in which he played the irascible senior veterinary surgeon Siegfried Farnon from 1978 to 1990, an adaptation of James Herriot's semi-autobiographical books. He received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actor for that role in 1980.

Hardy portrayed Winston Churchill on multiple occasions, most prominently in the 1981 Southern Television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, for which he received a second BAFTA nomination for Best Actor in 1982. He also played Churchill in The Sittaford Mystery, Bomber Harris, and War and Remembrance, and on 20 August 2010 he delivered Churchill's wartime address "Never was so much owed by so many to so few" at a ceremony marking the seventieth anniversary of the speech. He played Franklin D. Roosevelt on more than one occasion as well, including in the BBC serial Bertie and Elizabeth and the French television mini-series Le Grand Charles. Among his other notable television credits were the role of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in Elizabeth R in 1971, Arthur Brooke in the BBC production of Middlemarch in 1994, and Professor Neddy Welch in a 2002 co-production of Lucky Jim for PBS's Masterpiece series.

His film work included the role of Professor Krempe in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the recurring part of Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter film series. He also played Sir John Middleton in the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

Beyond acting, Hardy was a recognized authority on the medieval English longbow. His interest in the subject developed while performing Henry V, and in 1963 he wrote and presented a television documentary on the Battle of Agincourt. He authored two books on the longbow: Longbow: A Social and Military History and, with Matthew Strickland, The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose. He was consulted by the archaeologist responsible for raising the Mary Rose, served as Master of the Worshipful Company of Bowyers of the City of London from 1988 to 1990, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1996. Hardy was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1981 Birthday Honours.