Actor / Writer
Professional
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Robert Hardy CBE, was an actor who had a long career in the theatre, film and television. He began his career as a classical actor and later earned widespread recognition for roles such as Siegfried Farnon in the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small, Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter film series and Winston Churchill in several productions, beginning with the Southern Television series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years.
On playing Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter series...
It was great fun while it lasted, the boys and girls were all absolutely splendid. I had a ball fooling around with old friends like Maggie Smith. Thanks to those films I get the most extraordinary amount of fan mail from all over the world, even China.
As an undergraduate at Oxford he was taught by both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and is almost the last remaining actor who can not just gossip about Larry, Johnnie and Ralph but trod the boards with them all. His first professional role was at Stratford in the 1949 season and he’s never really stopped working since.
He is synonymous with All Creatures Great and Small, a huge BBC hit in the 70s and 80s, where he perfected tweedy irascibility as Siegfried Farnon.
His speciality was playing patrician figures with hidden depths of melancholy or spite, always with perfect diction. His most famous role was Winston Churchill, which he played in nine separate dramas.
It's important to get the little details right. It's not just the look, but stance, style and speech, too. It took me nine months of preparation to get Churchill right the first time I played him, back in 1981 in the drama series The Wilderness Years for ITV.
If you listen to somebody hour after hour, day after day, week after week, a familiarity comes. You stop thinking in terms of imitation, and you think in terms of approaching a person from the voice. The voice was the key. I thought I had nailed it, but I hadn’t. But never mind, it was enough to suggest to people.
His love of historical research led to him to an alternative career, as a very serious military historian. He remains, to this day, the preeminent expert on the longbow, the deadly weapon of Medieval England, which cut down at least 5,000 French at Agincourt.
When the Mary Rose was pulled out of the Solent he was put in charge of restoring and deciphering the 138 longbows that were rescued from the deep. He kept them in his cellar (to slowly dry them out) and minutely researched their construction and power.
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