Remembering Robert Hardy: Bluff, Big-hearted and a brilliant talent
WHEN it came to scene stealing, he was the master.
Robert Hardy, who has died at the age of 91, simply had to wander in front of the camera to dominate the show.
Christopher Timothy was nominally the main star of All Creatures Great And Small, but it was Hardy – in possibly his most famous role, that of rumbustious Siegfried Farnon – who really dominated the proceedings.
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“No two rehearsals with Robert were ever the same,” his co-star Peter Davison, who played Siegfried’s brother Tristan, later recalled.
“Sometimes he would bark the lines at me, sometimes spit them at me, sometimes gesticulate wildly, sometimes coil himself in controlled fury.”
But unlike so many actors who fi nd themselves typecast after making a huge success of a particular role, Hardy managed to avoid that fate.
He appeared in an enormous number of other parts on stage and screen and was extremely proud of the fact that he played Winston Churchill no fewer than nine times in different productions, which he claimed was a world record.
More recently he established his credentials with the younger generation through his portrayal of Cornelius Fudge, Minister for Magic in the Harry Potter films.
Robert Hardy starred as Cornelius Fudge in the Harry Potter films
Gruff, elegant, twinkly, and always dignified, he is celebrated by all who knew him and loved him, and everyone who enjoyed his work
But it was not enough for Hardy to make it as an actor alone, he also turned himself into an acclaimed historian, who was a world renowned authority on the English longbow.
He was a husband – twice – but, as he put it: “Although I spent much of my life married, I don’t think I did it that well.”
Hardy, like so many of those he portrayed, was a ladies’ man.
Asked why he hadn’t married again after his second divorce he replied, “I didn’t want to put anyone else through it.”
Timothy Sydney Robert Hardy was born on 29 October, 1925, in Cheltenham to Jocelyn and Henry Harrison Hardy, the youngest of five children.
His father was heeadmaster of Cheltenham College.
He was sent away to boarding school, which he loathed, and from there to Rugby, where his proficiency with a violin led many to suspect he was headed for a career as a musician.
However, it soon became apparent that he was an even better actor.
Even his violin teacher conceded this. After seeing him in the school play, he predicted: “You will be one of the greats.”
Hardy secured a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, to read English but his studies were put on hold by the Second World War.
He joined the RAF and was sent to the United States to train as a pilot but the war ended before he saw service.
At Magdalen he met two of the giants of 20th-century English literature: C S Lewis, author of the Narnia series of books and JRR Tolkien, who wrote The Lord Of The Rings.
Both were his tutors, but despite this early exposure to greatness he admitted on Desert Island Discs that he ended up with a “shabby” degree.
At Oxford he also met his almost exact contemporary, Richard Burton, who was to become a friend until Burton’s death in 1984.
By the time he left Oxford, his acting talents were so evident that the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon took him on and he appeared in Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier.
Burton also joined the RSC and Hardy would delight in recounting an outrageous story about Burton’s behaviour on stage – when his back was to the audience.
More classical roles followed, including an appearance in King John at the Old Vic in 1953.
By this time he had been married for a year to his first wife Elizabeth Fox, a wardrobe mistress, and they had a son, Paul.
However, in 1956 the marriage ended and five years later he wed Sally Pearson, the daughter of 1920s fi lm actress Gladys Cooper, with whom he had two daughters, Emma and Justine.
They divorced 25 years later, in 1986. “Now, I’m just a sheep compared to what I used to be like,” Hardy said in an interview in 2009.
“My second wife, Sally and I split up in the mid-1980s – she finally had enough of me – but it was perfectly amicable and we divorced on our silver wedding anniversary, which I thought was very civilised.”
By that time Hardy was already a household name. While he was a constant presence on stage and the TV screen, in 1978 there came the role that would change his life forever: Siegfried Farnon.
It was to run for 12 years and in the course of it Hardy fell “a little in love” with the show’s leading ladies, Carol Drinkwater and Lynda Bellingham, who played James Herriot’s wife Helen at different times.
His first outing as Churchill was in 1981 when he appeared in The Wilderness Years, a film that focused on Winnie’s career in the 1930s before he achieved greatness as a war leader.
Hardy actually met Churchill twice, as a boy and a young man, and maintained a long friendship with the great man’s youngest daughter Mary, Lady Soames.
He was also a godfather to one of Churchill’s great-grandsons, Alexander Perkins and was last seen as the wartime prime minister two and a half years ago in Churchill: 100 Days That Saved Britain.
Younger fans delighted in his role as Cornelius Fudge, although the Minister for Magic did not feature as heavily in the films as he did the books.
“I was very sad, because of the amusing and wicked people I worked with, like Robbie Coltrane, Michael Gambon and Maggie Smith, who is an old friend,” he said later.
“It was such fun to fi lm, and there were so many laughs on set that it was hard to come up with a sober face just before they shouted, ‘Action!’”
Officially his stance was that Fudge was written out because they didn’t have room to put everything in the films; unofficially he maintained it was his ribald, off-set behaviour that marked his card.
Like so many active, outgoing extroverts, Hardy had a dark side.
He suffered from bouts of depression, taking refuge in military history, and became such an expert on longbows that when the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship, was salvaged in 1982, the 138 longbows in the wreck were taken to his home where they dried out in his cellar.
His book Longbow: A Social And Military History remains the standard work on the subject.
By his own admission a prickly character with a fondness for alcohol, Hardy was not one to mince his words.
Asked a couple of years ago for his opinion of Daniel Craig as James Bond, he replied, “I don’t think he’s a good actor, but he’s very good at jumping.”
Nor was he impressed by Dominic West’s “simply terrible” portrayal of his old friend Burton in the BBC production Burton And Taylor.
“He was hopeless. He wasn’t tough enough, he wasn’t dangerous enough, he wasn’t Welsh enough.” He was brutally honest about Burton too.
“He died aged 59. And here I am, 90,” he said in 2015.
“It’s a tragedy. It’s his fault. Drinking too much, and spending too much time with Elizabeth Taylor. She was trouble.”
Not that Hardy was immune to her charms.
Recalling an occasion when he met up with the couple in a bar, he said: “She turned around, opened her arms and I walked slowly into them and then she kissed me on the mouth – and I’ll tell you, whether you liked her or not, that was quite an experience!”
Hardy’s three children summed him up perfectly in a statement released following his death: “Gruff, elegant, twinkly, and always dignified, he is celebrated by all who knew him and loved him, and everyone who enjoyed his work.
