Brian Blessed

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Image:Henry V Branagh.jpg Brian Blessed (born October 9, 1937) is an English actor, who came to fame as PC 'Fancy' Smith in the BBC TV police drama series Z Cars. He is a charismatic man with a booming voice and robust build who often plays powerful men in Shakespearian and medieval dramas. The son of a miner, he was born in the ex-mining town of Mexborough and grew up in the nearby town of Goldthorpe South Yorkshire.

He has been criticised for what his critics see as his use of shouting as an all-purpose characterization technique and was described by one magazine as "the loudest man alive", but this assessment disregards his greater skills, which have earned him a reputation as a great British actor and cult figure. Offstage he is said to be quite shy.

Blessed is also an adventurer. On three occasions, he has tried to climb Mount Everest (though he never reached the summit), and climbed higher than any other man of his age (56 years at the time; his height record was broken by Yuichiro Miura, aged 70, in 2003) during one attempt in 1993. He was on the mountain on May 10, 1996, when 12 climbers were killed in a sudden late-afternoon blizzard, though Blessed was safe at his base camp that day. He has successfully climbed Aconcagua in Argentina as well as Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

Blessed currently lives in Surrey. He is married to Hildegarde Neil and has a daughter, Rosalind Blessed, who is an actress.

Blessed is generally regarded as a hero of Shakespeare, as well as an immensely entertaining and often satirised comic figure, mainly because of his instantly recognisable voice. His role in Blackadder was something of a comic version of his characteristic Shakesperian roles.

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