Tim Pigott-Smith

Timothy Peter Pigott-Smith was born on 13 May 1946 in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, the son of Margaret Muriel (née Goodman) and Harry Thomas Pigott-Smith, a journalist. He attended Wyggeston Boys' School in Leicester and King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon before studying at Bristol University. He trained for the stage at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Pigott-Smith died on 7 April 2017 at age 70 from a heart attack in Northampton, where he had been preparing to appear in a touring production of Death of a Salesman scheduled to open three days later. He is buried on the east side of Highgate Cemetery.

Pigott-Smith's stage career began with Shakespearean and Greek roles, including Posthumus in John Barton's 1974 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Cymbeline, for which he was credited as "Tim Smith." He later produced and appeared in Saki: a celebration at the National Theatre alongside Dirk Bogarde, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and Zoë Wanamaker, a production subsequently released as an audio book. In 2009 he played Ken Lay in Enron at the Chichester Festival Theatre and in London, and in 2011 he took the title role in King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and appeared as Tobias in A Delicate Balance at the Almeida Theatre in London. He returned to the Almeida in 2014 to play a post-accession Charles, Prince of Wales in King Charles III, a role that earned him an Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination.

His Broadway career spanned from 1974 to 2015 and included appearances in Sherlock Holmes, The Iceman Cometh, and King Charles III. The Broadway transfer of King Charles III in 2015 brought Pigott-Smith a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Actor in a Play, both in 2016.

On television, Pigott-Smith's career-defining role was Ronald Merrick in the 1984 serial The Jewel in the Crown, for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in 1985. His earlier BBC appearance as Arthur Llewellyn Davies in The Lost Boys had helped him secure that leading role. He appeared twice in Doctor Who, in The Claws of Axos in 1971 and The Masque of Mandragora in 1976. Additional television credits included the title role in the crime drama series The Chief from 1990 to 1993, a recurring role as Vickers in The Vice, and Commissioner Mayne in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher from 2011 to 2014. He played Sir Philip Tapsell in the fifth episode of Downton Abbey's third series and appeared in Midsomer Murders, Bloody Sunday, and a 2015 episode of Lewis. He also portrayed Charles, Prince of Wales in the television version of King Charles III. Pigott-Smith narrated several documentary series, among them The Team: A Season with McLaren, the Battlefield series on Second World War operations, and Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work, which followed Queen Elizabeth II over more than a year including the 2007 state visit to the United States.

His film work included Clash of the Titans (1981), Gangs of New York (2002), Johnny English (2003), Alexander (2004), V for Vendetta (2005), Quantum of Solace (2008), in which he played the Foreign Secretary, Red 2 (2013), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and Victoria & Abdul (2017), in which he played Sir Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary, in what became his final film role. He also appeared as Major General Robert Ford in Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday (2002).

Pigott-Smith was additionally active in radio, appearing in numerous BBC Radio 4 productions, including playing Sherlock Holmes in a radio adaptation of The Valley of Fear. He authored two children's books in The Baker Street Mysteries series — The Dragon Tattoo (2008) and Shadow of Evil (2009) — and published Out of India, a diary of his impressions of India written during the making of The Jewel in the Crown, combined with an anthology of poetry and prose. In the 2017 New Year Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to drama.