Brian Blessed ( BLES-id; born 9 October 1936) is an English actor. He is known for his distinctive bushy beard, loud booming voice, and exuberant personality and performances. He portrayed PC "Fancy" Smith in Z-Cars; Augustus in the 1976 BBC television production of I, Claudius; Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon; Bustopher Jones and Old Deuteronomy in the 1981 original London production of Cats at the New London Theatre; King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder; Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, in Henry V; Boss Nass in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace; and the voice of Clayton and the Tarzan yell in Disney's Tarzan.
In 2016, Blessed was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the arts and charity.
Blessed was born on 9 October 1936 at Montagu Hospital in Mexborough, West Riding of Yorkshire, the son of William Blessed, a socialist coal miner at Hickleton Main Colliery (and himself the son of a coal miner) and cricketer for the Yorkshire second team, and Hilda (née Wall). He had a brother, Alan, seven years younger, and the pair "went everywhere together" when they were growing up. Alan Blessed died from leukaemia aged 52; their mother died aged 87, and their father died aged 99. Blessed's great-great-grandfather, Jabez Blessed, was the father of 13 children and worked as a china and glass dealer in Brigg, Lincolnshire; many of Blessed's relatives hail from Brigg.
Blessed went to Bolton on Dearne Secondary Modern School, where he was the school boxing champion and captain of the football and cricket teams. When he was 14, his father was involved in a mining accident and endured a long and painful recovery; his mother then suffered a nervous breakdown and had to go to hospital for electric shock treatment, which forced him to leave school and find work as an undertaker's assistant and, later, as a plasterer. He then completed his national service in the RAF Regiment, in Bicester, before winning a scholarship to study drama at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1956.
One of Blessed's earliest roles was that of PC "Fancy" Smith in the BBC television series Z-Cars, between 1962 and 1965. In 1966, he appeared in a production of Incident at Vichy at the Phoenix Theatre in London. Also in 1966, he was offered the titular role of the Doctor in BBC's sci-fi drama, Doctor Who, to take over from William Hartnell, but had to turn it down due to conflicting projects. In 1967, he played Porthos in a 10-part BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Blessed also had minor roles in cult TV series such as The Avengers (1967, 1969) and the original Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969). He interpreted the role of King Mark of Cornwall in the HTV television series Arthur of the Britons (1972–1973). He appeared as William Woodcock in the Yorkshire Television series Boy Dominic (1974). He played Caesar Augustus in the BBC Two drama series I, Claudius (1976), Vargas in the Blake's 7 episode Cygnus Alpha (1978) and Basileos in The Aphrodite Inheritance (1979). He hosted a docudrama on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach called The Joy of Bach (1978), in which he also played Bach in a number of scenes.
Blessed also appeared in two episodes of the British science fiction television series Space: 1999. He played scientist Dr Cabot Rowland in the 1975 episode "Death's Other Dominion" and Mentor in the 1976 episode "The Metamorph".
Blessed played Long John Silver in the 10-part serial Return to Treasure Island (1986), King Yrcanos in the Doctor Who serial Mindwarp (1986), General Yevlenko in the mini-series War and Remembrance (1988), and Lord Loxley, the father of Robin Hood, in the Hollywood film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).
In 1981, Blessed appeared in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, Cats, as both Old Deuteronomy and Bustopher Jones, for the original West End theatre production.
Blessed has appeared in a number of Shakespearean roles on both stage and screen, including four of the five Shakespeare films directed by Kenneth Branagh: as the Duke of Exeter in Henry V (1989), Antonio in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), the Ghost of Hamlet's Father in Hamlet (1996), and both Duke Frederick and Duke Senior in As You Like It (2006).
In comedies, Blessed portrayed Prince Vultan in the film Flash Gordon (1980); the mad, comical figure of Richard IV in the first series of The Black Adder (1983), a role Blessed has claimed to be one of his most cherished; and Spiro Halikiopoulos in the TV mini-series My Family and Other Animals (1987), a BBC adaptation of Gerald Durrell's book by the same name. Blessed has joked that he was due to appear in Blackadder II (1986) as Elizabeth I, but was unavailable for filming. In 1989, he made an appearance in the comedy/drama Minder, as Detective Inspector Freddie Dyer of the Serious Crime Squad in the episode The Last Video Show.
In 1997, Blessed portrayed Squire Western in the BBC adaptation of Henry Fielding's 1749 comic novel Tom Jones. He later recalled accidentally punching Peter Capaldi whilst filming and said of the event, "I thought I'd killed the poor bastard."
In 1999, Blessed provided both the voice and live-action reference for the CGI character Boss Nass in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and also provided the voice of the villainous hunter Clayton in Disney's animated feature film Tarzan, a role he later reprised in the video game based on the film and in the critically acclaimed Kingdom Hearts in 2002; he also did the Tarzan yell after Tony Goldwyn was unable to do it himself. He voiced "Sir Morris" in the 1999 cartoon series The Big Knights. He read the story "The White City" for the album series Late Night Tales, recording it in four parts released over four albums, and was also the voice of Jean Valjean in Focus on the Family Radio Theatre's audio adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Blessed was one of the narrators for Story Teller, a children's magazine partwork series in the 1980s. He has further provided vocal links for the Sony-Award-winning Christian O'Connell Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio, and introduced advertisements for Orange mobile phones.
In 2002, under the direction of Royal Shakespeare Company director Adrian Noble, he originated the role of Baron Bomburst for the stage musical version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. From December 2005 to January 2006, Blessed headlined the Christmas pantomime production of Peter Pan, alongside CBBC presenter Kirsten O'Brien, at Ipswich's Regent Theatre. From 2007 to 2008, he appeared in the same play as Captain Hook at the Grove Theatre in Dunstable; he reprised the role for the Christmas 2008 season at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon. For Christmas 2006, he presented a production of Cinderella for Virgin Radio, starring David Tennant, Thandiwe Newton and others.
Since October 2008, Blessed has presented the English-language dub of the Japanese TV game show Unbeatable Banzuke on Challenge, under the pseudonym "Banzuke Brian". He was the narrator of the Sky 1 series Crash Test Dummies, starring Steve Marsh and Dan Wright. In animation, he has provided the voices of Bob in Kika & Bob (2008) and Grampy Rabbit in Peppa Pig (2004–present).
In 2009 Blessed starred with his wife, Hildegarde Neil, in the short film Mr Bojagi.
Following a Facebook campaign, satellite navigation manufacturer TomTom recorded Blessed's voice for use in its products; he has been available as a voice command option since October 2010. In September 2010, Blessed recorded the voice of Great Sultan Shahryār for Sheherazade, or The Princess, the Pirate and the Baboon!, an album of children's stories set to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's classical music composition Scheherazade, co-starring Rory Bremner and released as an instalment of Grandma Dingley's Ingeniously Musical Tales in 2011.
In 2018, Blessed voiced German military engineer Konrad Kyeser in the open-world medieval RPG, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. He voiced the megalomaniacal Red Ivan in the 2021 base building game Evil Genius 2: World Domination.