Robert Hardy dead aged 91 – tributes to Harry Potter star who played Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge in films as he dies after 70-year career
ACTOR Robert Hardy, who enthralled millions of television viewers on All Creatures Great and Small, died yesterday aged 91.
He played eccentric but lovable Siegried Farnon in the BBC drama, which regularly pulled in almost 20million viewers.
Later, he won a new generation of child fans when he played Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge in four Harry Potter films.
His family described him as “gruff, elegant, twinkly, and always dignified”.
Christopher Timothy, Hardy’s co-star in the vets series, set in the Yorkshire Dales and based on the books of James Herriot, called him a “joy to work with”.
The 76-year-old added: “He didn’t suffer fools so he was sometimes quite tricky.
But I was most grateful for his experience, confidence, wit and style.
“He was a very clever fellow. I remember once on set he was talking about manure, and his description of the smell was pure poetry.”
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Harry Potter actor Chris Rankin, who played Percy Weasley in the films, tweeted he was “terribly sad” to hear of Hardy’s death.
He said: “He was a very kind man who told wonderful stories.”
Hardy also played Winston Churchill 12 times, starting in 1981 — the year he was awarded a CBE — with ITV series The Wilderness Years for which he was Bafta nominated.
His final portrayal of the wartime PM came in 2015 with Churchill: 100 Days That Saved Britain.
At the time he called it “undoubtedly the greatest challenge of my acting career”.
He said: “To prepare I spent nine months listening — morning, afternoon and evening — to 24 double-sided long playing records of all the speeches he’d made.
“By the end of those nine months I could tell which of the recordings Churchill had made before lunch, and which he’d made after.”
As well as being an accomplished actor over 70 years, Hardy was also a respected military historian and the world’s leading on the medieval longbow.
He was part of the team that worked on the raising in 1982 of Henry VIII’s sunken warship The Tudor Rose in the Solent.
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Twice divorced, the father of three admitted he was a better actor than a husband and blamed a tendency to fall in love with his leading ladies.
He said: “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 was born in Cheltenham, Gloucs, on October 29 1925.
His studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, were interrupted by wartime service in the RAF before he returned to gain an English degree.
At University he also forged a lifelong friendship with fellow student and future Hollywood superstar Richard Burton.
He joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1948 at the age of 23.
One of his earliest TV jobs, in 1955, saw him take on Shakespeare in Othello.
He moved into cinema in 1958 as a naval officer in Torpedo Run and seven years later was reunited with Burton for his first big screen role in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
He died in Denville Hall, a North West London retirement home for actors.
His children Emma, Justine and Paul said they would remember him “as a meticulous linguist, a fine artist, a lover of music and a champion of literature, as well a highly respected historian, and a leading specialist on the longbow”.