Mercurial Shakespearean actor who became a TV vet

Robert Hardy was a gifted actor who mastered all roles “except marriage”, said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail. Mercurial, mischievous and easily distracted, he admitted to having “spent a good deal of my adult life married, but I don’t think on the whole I did it very well”. His two marriages ended in divorce. What he did do well was bring those same qualities to the roles with which he was indelibly associated: that of Siegfried Farnon, the irascible, soft-hearted owner of a veterinary practice in TV’S All Creatures Great and Small; and of Winston Churchill, whom Hardy played a remarkable eight times in a range of films and television dramas. Stevens said he shall best remember Hardy as a brilliant “raconteur”: the actor’s stories included the time he was in Richard Burton’s dressing room after a production of Hamlet and Churchill himself paid a visit. “Your Highness,” the then prime minister addressed Burton, “I am in great need. Do you have a lavatory?”

Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy, who has died aged 91, was born in 1925, the son of the headmaster of Cheltenham College. He studied English at Oxford, then embarked on a career as an actor. Hardy was too patrician in tone and bearing to become a movie idol in an era when audiences swooned for the working-class grit of a Burton or an Albert Finney. Yet over the years that followed, he established himself as one of the best-loved faces on television, said The Times – an actor whose “intelligence and larger-than-life portrayals could enliven the smallest part or the dullest drama”. Film roles included the stolid if kindly Lord Bob Lilburn in The Shooting Party (1985) and the irrepressible Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility (1995). Late in life, he reached a new audience as the Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, in four Harry Potter films. He was “gently dropped” after the 2007 movie because, then in his 80s, he cost £1m per film to insure. By his own account, Hardy wasn’t easy to work with. While playing Siegfried in All Creatures Great and Small – which was TV’S most popular drama for much of its run, between 1978 and 1990 – he insisted on script approval, and would personally rewrite great tracts of dialogue, if he felt his character was slipping into caricature. Possessed of an acute intellect, he had written the definitive book on the history of the English longbow. Despite frequent offers from publishers, he refused to collaborate on his memoirs. “I am a writer,” he said, “and I will write it myself.” Sadly, that autobiography never appeared.