Brilliant at everything but marriage, Robert Hardy dies at 91
Raconteur, historian, brilliant musician and lover of his leading ladies. Robert Hardy dies at 91
ROBERT HARDY was a rascal. A man of unbridled enthusiasm, with a voice like butter melting on a hot crumpet, he would tell his scurrilous anecdotes in perfectly composed prose, as if reading aloud. His language was so erudite, his grammar so meticulously correct, that it was hard to reconcile the sound of his educated voice with the sheer mischief of his favourite stories.
The actor, who has died aged 91, became a household name as eccentric vet Siegfried Farnon, whom he played for 12 years in the BBC1 series All Creatures Great And Small, and for his portrayals of Winston Churchill — Hardy claimed he held the world record, for being Churchill in 12 different TV, film and stage productions.
To younger audiences, he was best known as the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, in four Harry Potter films. It was Hardy’s love of ribald stories, told with a gleeful lack of embarrassment, that eventually cost him that role, he believed.
While the young cast were professionals, always ready for a scene, Hardy was more likely to be raising a rumpus on the fringes of the set with old friends such as Maggie Smith and Imelda Staunton.
‘We did not work — at least, I didn’t,’ Hardy once said. ‘We just mucked about and laughed a lot, and got shushed by whichever director it was: “Could you PLEASE be quiet in there!”’
Being quiet was one of the few things Hardy was incapable of doing well.
As an actor, he achieved a feat that probably no other performer has managed; of being wholly identified with a single role (as Churchill), yet being even more celebrated for another TV series (All Creatures) while remaining a heavyweight of the theatre.
On top of that, he was not merely a respected historian, but the world’s leading authority on the English longbow, and such an expert on Tudor artefacts that in 1982 he was an advisor to the team that salvaged Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose.
Throughout his life, Hardy made achievement seem effortless.
Born Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy in Cheltenham, in October 1925, he excelled at school — helped by the fact that his father Henry was the headmaster of Cheltenham College.
But he had a bad start in education. The youngest child of five, he was so unruly as a boy that he was sent to boarding school: ‘I look back on it with hatred and loathing. I made it even more difficult for myself by behaving badly.’ At his secondary school, Rugby, his violin teacher had hopes that young Robert would become a professional musician, until seeing him in the school play.
During the next music lesson, the tutor predicted: ‘You will be a great actor.’
Hardy won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, but joined the RAF in 1944, going to the U.S. to train as a pilot. Before he could see action, the war was over and Hardy returned to Britain to finish his degree — not history, but English.
HIS TUTORS included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, the creators respectively of Narnia and Middle Earth — one nurtured his love of Shakespeare, the other taught him how to pronounce Chaucer’s English.
At Oxford, Hardy met another future star, Richard Burton. The two would be close friends for 40 years, but at first detested each other — Hardy thought the young Welshman brash and uncouth. He soon revised his opinion, calling Burton ‘ the most extraordinary man that I ever met’. Within two months of sitting his finals in November 1948, Hardy had a berth at the Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Self-deprecatingly, he claimed the war left ‘thousands of places to fill’, but this modesty was belied by his rapid rise.
By 1953, he was reunited with Burton at the Old Vic, for a famously successful season which gave him one of his most outrageous anecdotes.
With mock disapproval, in the plummiest tones, Hardy would describe how Burton reduced the cast of King John to hysterical onstage giggles: the star turned his back on the audience for an entire speech, unbuttoned his breeches and ‘behaved disgracefully’.
Disgraceful behaviour was sometimes a speciality of his own. He married Elizabeth Fox, a wardrobe mistress, in 1952, but left her and their young son when he took up with his second wife, Sally Cooper. They had two daughters, but were divorced after 25 years.
‘I have spent a good deal of my adult life married, but I don’t think on the whole I did it very well,’ he admitted in 1995. ‘It was wrong of me to quit my first marriage the way I did. As for my second marriage, I think the divorce papers came through on our silver wedding anniversary.
‘I am not a very good partner. It may be because of the kind of person I am, but then I don’t think actors are always ideal partners. I hate that special pleading for actors, as if we were a race apart who should be excused and forgiven a great deal.’
Drink played a part in his problems, he said, but his downfall was a tendency to fall in love with leading ladies . . . and sometimes to be unable to conceal his lust.
In 1960, he was Henry V in the landmark TV series An Age Of Kings, which combined several of Shakespeare’s histories.
Aged just 26, Judi Dench was Katherine, Princess of France, and Hardy was briefly besotted — ‘unspeakably pretty and adorable and delicious, and had me really very, very hot under the collar’.
Anticipation got the better of him in their love scene.
‘It’s the only time I had trouble with my hose,’ he would say, referring to the Shakespearean tights. Fortunately, neither the camera nor the leading lady were aware of his excitement — but when he confessed to her years later ‘she was thrilled to bits!’
During the Sixties and Seventies, he was a fixture in costume dramas and prestigious serials, as the Earl of Leicester for example in Elizabeth R in 1971. But he made the step from acclaimed actor to national star in 1978, when he was cast as blustering, bullying, soft-hearted Siegfried Farnon, who ran a dysfunctional veterinary practice in the Yorkshire Dales during the Thirties.
The hero was new young vet James Herriot, played by Christopher Timothy, and the heart-throb role went to Peter Davison, as Siegfried’s attractive but scatterbrained younger brother, Tristan.
Yet Hardy stole the show. A glorious mixture of Captain Mainwaring and a mad duke, he roared, rumbled, goggled, growled, hallooed and harrumphed his way through every scene.
Peter Davison later said: ‘No two rehearsals with Robert were ever the same. Sometimes he would bark the lines at me, sometimes spit them at me, sometimes gesticulate wildly, sometimes coil himself in controlled fury.’
It was a television tour de force, completely inimitable, and for much of its 12-year run as the BBC’s Sunday evening flagship, All Creatures was the most popular drama on TV.
Hardy took it immensely seriously, demanding script approval to ensure that Siegfried never teetered over into caricature. But he continued to be his mischievous, irrepressible self, falling ‘a little in love’ with both show’s female stars, Carol Drinkwater and Lynda Bellingham, who variously played the role of Herriot’s wife, Helen.
His second career, as the reincarnation of Sir Winston Churchill, began in 1981 when he starred in The Wilderness Years, a study of the great politician in the Thirties. He played him in one- off TV movies, in the 1989 mini- series War And Remembrance, in an episode of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, and most recently in 2015 in drama-documentary Churchill: 100 Days That Saved Britain.
THE part became his own for more than 30 years — although Albert Finney gave him strong competition in 2002 — but it was the one that challenged him most.
‘My family complained loudly about my behaviour when I was playing him,’ Hardy said, ‘ and I can understand why. I started to inhabit another realm, and the reality of day-to-day life seemed fuzzy compared to what I was engaged in.’
Churchill’s volcanic temper also affected him, and made his daily moods ‘volatile, mercurial’. He shared the Grand Old Man’s lack of tact — ask Hardy what he thought of other actors and he would be unsparing.
Timothy Spall’s version of Churchill in 2010 film The King’s Speech was ‘absolutely awful,’ he declared. His verdict on Daniel Craig as 007 was crushing: ‘I don’t think he’s a good actor, but he’s very good at jumping.’ He could also be immensely generous. Ten years ago, after I wrote to his agent requesting an interview, he phoned me one Sunday out of the blue.
‘Is that Christopher Stevens?’ he asked — mockery and flattery, delivered with velvet charm. Then he offered a masterclass in stories of actors he had known.
For all his flamboyance and brilliance, Hardy often wished he could have been an academic instead. He was prone to sudden bouts of depression, and his solace then would be to immerse himself in military history.
When the Mary Rose was raised, the 138 longbows discovered in the wreck were delivered into his safekeeping. While they dried out in his cellar, he investigated every aspect of their manufacture. His book on the English longbow remains the definitive volume.
Even well into his 80s, Hardy rebuffed all pleas from publishers to collaborate with a ghost writer and tell his extraordinary life story. ‘I am a writer,’ he would say indignantly, ‘and I will write it myself.’
The autobiography never appeared. We can only hope that in his effects, among the dusty scripts and learned papers, there’s a handwritten manuscript containing all those shockingly funny anecdotes, as only Robert Hardy could tell them.