Born: 29 October 1925, Died: 3 August 2017
Robert Hardy was a mainstay of British television since the 1950s. I personally came to love him through the wonderful series All Creatures Great and Small which ran from 1978 to 1990. Robert Hardy played the eccentric but brilliant veterinarian Siegfried Farnon who became James Herriot’s mentor and dear friend.
I personally have seen very few of the Harry Potter series of films but I believed he brilliantly played the character of Cornelius Fudge.
He appeared in many great TV series and films through the years. My personal favourite Robert Hardy characters are as Winston Churchill in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years; Russell Spam in Hot Metal; Arthur Brooke in Middlemarch and Sir James Caird in Shackleton.
It was no surprise that a great character actor like Robert Hardy was asked to appear in a Morse episode, Twilight of the Gods (Series 7, episode 3). In that episode he played the belligerent, ego maniac Andrew Baydon. In the Lewis series he appears as the much more lovable character Sir Arnold Raeburn in the episode Dark Matter (Series 4, episode 2).
Below is a short video of some of his scenes from the two above mentioned series. The scenes contain spoilers.
