Anthony Andrews (Born 12 January 1948)

Anthony Colin Gerald Andrews was born in Finchley, London, on 12 January 1948.

His father, Stanley Thomas Andrews, arranged and conducted music for the BBC. His mother, Geraldine Agnes Cooper, was a dancer.

Andrews began dance lessons at eight. His very first stage appearance came not long after, playing the White Rabbit in a children's production of Alice in Wonderland.

He started his professional life behind the scenes, as an assistant stage manager at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the late 1960s.

His West End debut followed in 1969, in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On at the Apollo Theatre, cast as one of twenty schoolboys in a production starring John Gielgud.

On 1 December 1971, Andrews married the actress Georgina Simpson — herself an heiress to the Simpsons of Piccadilly department store fortune, and, later, a champion showjumper. "Our romance began the moment we met," he said of her.

They went on to have three children — Joshua, Jessica, and Amy-Samantha, known as Sammy — all of whom eventually found careers of their own in the arts.

Television work followed steadily through the 1970s: Operation Daybreak (1975), and then Danger UXB (1979), in which Andrews played a young bomb-disposal officer defusing unexploded ordnance across Blitz-torn London — a role that made him a familiar face in Britain well before his biggest one arrived.

Around the same time, Andrews was offered the lead in a new American series about a debonair, fictional private detective, and turned it down.

Taking the part would have meant uprooting his two eldest children and signing a seven-year Hollywood contract; he chose to stay in England instead.

The role, Remington Steele, went to a largely unknown Irish actor named Pierce Brosnan, and made him a star.

Andrews had, by then, already accepted an offer from Granada Television for a much bigger gamble: an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. 

He had originally been considered for the novel's narrator, Charles Ryder — the part that eventually went to Jeremy Irons — but had his heart set on someone else entirely. "Sebastian was the part I wanted to play, having read the book," he said, "and though I was initially seen for Charles Ryder, it was Sebastian I was after, and luckily I got him."

Brideshead Revisited aired across eleven episodes in 1981, and Andrews's Sebastian Flyte — charming and self-destructive, always turned out in immaculate white flannels and clutching a teddy bear named Aloysius — became one of the defining images of British television. 

The performance won him the 1982 BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor and a Golden Globe the following year, along with an Emmy nomination.

The same year, two more period roles carried Andrews's name across the Atlantic: the title role in the television film Ivanhoe, and Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel — a fop who hid his daring double life rescuing aristocrats from the French Revolution behind lace cuffs, an embroidered silk waistcoat, and an elaborately curled wig.

Between the two roles, and Brideshead, Andrews spent the early 1980s as English television's reigning aristocrat.

Later credits ranged just as widely across period and prestige work: Nero in the miniseries A.D. (1985), King George VI in Cambridge Spies (2003), Mr. Murdstone in a television David Copperfield (2000), and, in 2010, a supporting role as Stanley Baldwin in the Oscar-winning The King's Speech.

In 2003, while starring as Henry Higgins in a stage production of My Fair Lady, Andrews developed a genuinely dangerous habit: he was drinking as much as eight litres of water a day.

The resulting case of water intoxication — a dilution of sodium in the blood serious enough to disrupt normal nerve function — caused him to lose consciousness. He spent three days in intensive care before recovering fully.

With his fine features, tall and slim figure and natural elegance, Anthony Andrews was constantly casted as an British aristocrat, but it seems he was tired of the typecast after the film The woman he loved. And for the next three decades Anthony Andrews avoided any aristocratic roles according to him, and in 2010 he even successfully portrayed the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the acclaimed film The King's Speech staring Colin Firth.

But it seemed playing aristocrat is part of Anthony Andrews's destiny, and in 2015, he played Lord Hazelwood in TV series The Syndicate.

Anthony Andrews and his wife Georgina Simpson are still married, having long since passed their fortieth wedding anniversary. Their friendship with Princess Anne, forged through a shared love of horses and eventing, made her the godmother of their youngest daughter, Sammy.

Decades after Brideshead first aired, Andrews — six feet tall, fair-haired, and still recognizably the boy who once played opposite a teddy bear named Aloysius — remains one of British television's most enduring images of a certain kind of doomed, well-dressed elegance.