David Bradley(IV)

Seemingly omnipresent on both stage and screen, David Bradley has amassed a truly diverse gallery of memorable characters. The pugnacious-looking, gruff-voiced performer has played fools and kings, gardeners and fishermen, policemen and murderers, priests and madmen, undertakers and rabbis, a druid and a vampire hunter. On the Shakespearean stage alone, he has headlined as Henry IV, Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, King of Britain. His numerous portrayals have included the foolish Polonius in Hamlet, the jester Trinculo in The Tempest, Mephostophiles in Doctor Faustus, and, unsurprisingly, Ebenezer Scrooge. He is quoted, saying, "Not all the characters I play are on the side of the angels....I consider myself fortunate in having a lot of variety of work whether it's on stage or on film, and the parts have been rich and varied."

Bradley was born in York where his first exposure to performing in public at the age of fourteen began inauspiciously (he fainted from an attack of nerves). Nonetheless, he found himself inexorably drawn to the acting profession after a trip to the pictures, watching Laurence Olivier in his celebrated role as Richard III (1955). Having left Catholic school, Bradley began his professional life by serving a five-year long apprenticeship with the optical instruments manufacturing firm of Cooke, Troughton & Simms, a subsidiary of Vickers. Moving on in 1966, he eventually took his first steps on the stage in musical productions with the York Boys Club and the Rowntree Youth Theatre. From there, he moved on to join the Settlement Players (getting his first grounding in roles by Shakespeare and Chekhov) and then the York Co-operative Players, where he was mentored by the producer Edward Taylor. Bradley later explained: "He's the one who encouraged me to go to drama school, and helped me with my audition speeches."

Having relocated to London, Bradley was accepted by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and, in 1968, made his bona fide acting debut in a RADA theatrical production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 1972, he successfully auditioned for Olivier and spent several seasons with the National Theatre Company. In 1978, he became an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company. One of the high points of his theatrical career was receiving a Laurence Olivier Award in 1991 for his role as the fool in King Lear. More recently, in 2005, he headlined as Henry IV in Parts One and Two at London's Olivier Theatre.

On screen from 1971, Bradley toiled for some two decades in unremarkable supporting parts. His acting sharpened with the passage of time and he was given more substantial roles to play by the mid-90s. Three of his early standouts were in BBC period drama: his David Crimp, Secretary of the 'Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company', in an adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994); the lecherous and miserly Baronet Sir Pitt Crawley in Vanity Fair (1998) and the leering blackmailer Rogue Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend (1998), based on a lesser known novel by Charles Dickens. He also appeared with Christopher Eccleston in the political drama Our Friends in the North (1996), as independent Labour MP Eddie Wells. In Bradley's own words: "That was the biggest part I'd ever done on TV and it opened up a lot of opportunities for me on screen". In the excellent musical drama six-part miniseries Blackpool (2004), Bradley later portrayed Hallworth, a devout Christian anti-gambling crusader and vocal opponent of David Morrissey's overambitious arcade owner Ripley Holden.

After playing a succession of curmudgeons and cantankerous old geezers, Bradley took a surprising detour into the comical, co-starring opposite Dawn French and Catherine Tate in Wild West (2002) as the entrepreneurial Cornish boatman Old Jake. He also popped up as the (aptly named) gun-toting farmer Arthur Webley in the buddy cop comedy Hot Fuzz (2007) and as Cohen the Barbarian, Discworld's 'greatest warrior', in Sky One's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's quirky fantasy The Color of Magic (2008). By that time, he had also embarked on his recurring role as Argus Filch, the caretaker of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in the Harry Potter films. Bradley later revealed that his children had steered him towards the Harry Potter franchise and 'coached' him for the role of Filch.

Returning to period drama, Bradley appeared in too few scenes as the (wise) court jester Will Somers, the only individual who would console a distraught Henry VIII after the death of Jane Seymour in Showtime's historical drama series The Tudors (2007). The following year saw him nominated by the London Film Critics Circle as Best Supporting Actor for his role as Ronnie Hepple in Mike Leigh's acclaimed 'kitchen sink' comedy-drama Another Year (2010).

If Harry Potter had not already put him on the map, Bradley's next set of performances would certainly have done the trick. In 2014, he won a BAFTA TV Award for his role as the tormented Jack Marshall, a local shopkeeper in Broadchurch (2013), unjustly accused of being a paedophile and murderer, consequently driven to suicide. Returning to the dark side side, he subsequently portrayed his most evil character to date, the duplicitous Walder Frey, Lord of Riverrun, in HBO's epic series Game of Thrones (2011). Bradley relished the role of the man audiences loved to hate, with Frey having presided over the 'red wedding' (in season three's penultimate episode), at which Robb, Talisa and Catelyn Stark and many of their bannermen were brutally slain. In the aftermath of the show, Bradley quipped to reporters at the Television Critics Association's press tour "wedding invitations have dried up".

In 2012, Bradley made his entry (not counting earlier voice-over work and podcasts) into the Doctor Who (2005) universe as Solomon, a ruthless space pirate, in the episode "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship'. He was then perfectly cast as William Hartnell --the actor who portrayed the very first Doctor in 1963-- in the BBC's excellent docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time (2013). Bradley followed up to play Hartnell's role in an episode of season ten ('The Doctor Falls'), the 2017 Christmas special 'Twice Upon a Time' and in the final 2022 special, entitled 'The Power of the Doctor'.

More recently, Bradley has appeared on TV as the fierce vampire hunter Abraham Setrakian, a holocaust survivor and New York pawnshop proprietor, relentlessly in pursuit of the demonic Strigoi (led by 'The Master', aka Sariel) while combating a global viral outbreak known as The Strain (2014). For his commanding performance, Bradley was nominated for a Fangoria Chainsaw Award and a Saturn Award by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA. Incidentally, the show's Setrakian character bears more than a passing resemblance to Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's classic 'Dracula'.

Bradley's other recent roles of note have included a wizened Druid in the historical fantasy Britannia (2017), the demented father of suicidal newspaper writer Tony Johnson (Ricky Gervais) in the black comedy After Life (2019) and the voice of Fowler, an elderly, stiff-upper-lip rooster and ex-RAF mascot, in Aardman's animation Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023).

David Bradley holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warwick and from York St. John University. He has long resided n Stratford-upon-Avon, where he has served as president of Second Thoughts, a local community theatre group set up in 1984.