Anthony Andrews

Early life and career[edit]

Andrews was born in London, the son of Geraldine Agnes (née Cooper), a dancer, and Stanley Thomas Andrews, an arranger and conductor for the BBC.^[1] He grew up in North Finchley, London. At the age of eight, he took dancing lessons, making his stage debut as the White Rabbit in a stage adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.^[2] He attended the Royal Masonic School for Boys in Bushey, Hertfordshire.


After a series of jobs that included catering, farming and journalism, he secured a position at the Chichester Theatre, where he worked as an assistant stage manager and later as a stand-in producer. In 1968, he auditioned for a production of Alan Bennett's new play, Forty Years On, which featured John Gielgud as the headmaster of a British public school during the First World War period. Andrews was cast as Skinner, one of twenty schoolboys. In 1974 he played Lord Robert, Marquis of Stockbridge in the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs. In 1975 he had a leading role in the Spanish film Las adolescentes (The Adolescents), opposite Koo Stark.^[3]


In June 1977, he was cast in the role of Bodie in the ITV series The Professionals. However, after three days of filming, the creator and producer Brian Clemens believed that the chemistry between Andrews and Martin Shaw (Doyle) did not work and that "the pair did not have the required undercurrent of menace to carry off the concept". Lewis Collins replaced Andrews in the part.^[4] Following that, in 1979, Andrews was the main star of the ITV television series Danger UXB, in which he played a British bomb disposal officer in the London Blitz.^[5] The series first aired in the United Kingdom in 1979 on the ITV network.


His subsequent work includes the leading role of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (1981). In 1982, he won a Golden Globe and BAFTA TV Award for his performance and was nominated for an Emmy Award. In the United States, Andrews is best known for his portrayal of the titular character in the television film Ivanhoe as well as that of Sir Percy Blakeney in the film The Scarlet Pimpernel (both 1982).^[5]


At the National Theatre in London he was in Coming in to Land (1986/1987) by Stephen Poliakoff alongside Dame Maggie Smith.^[6] He also played Professor Higgins in a stage version of My Fair Lady (2003), and Count Fosco in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White (2005).^[7]


He was the narrator for a 21st anniversary BBC Radio 2 special broadcast of Cameron Mackintosh's musical Les Misérables, sung by the then West End cast at the Mermaid Theatre in London on Sunday 8 October 2006. Andrews appeared as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the film The King's Speech (2010), for which he won a SAG Award along with Helena Bonham Carter, Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Guy Pearce, Geoffrey Rush and Timothy Spall.