Anthony Calf

LAMDA-trained and a stage actor first, Calf has the kind of screen career that British theatre people accumulate sideways: dozens of credits, most of them men with authority who are not the protagonist. He did The Madness of George III at the National Theatre and he is in the film version too, as Fitzroy, which is a neat summary of how the two halves of his working life feed each other.

The specific skill is polite obstruction. New Tricks made the type famous, with DAC Robert Strickland, the senior officer whose function in the format is to say no, and Calf played him as a man who sincerely believes the paperwork matters rather than as a stuffed shirt. It is a harder note than it looks, and it is why he keeps getting cast as barristers, doctors, colonels and earls: Mark Berner in The Children Act, Dr William Murray in the 2013 Dracula, Colonel Fitzwilliam in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, the Duke of Albany in the 2018 King Lear, Lord Brightlingsea in The Buccaneers, Anthony Eden in Upstairs Downstairs, Sir Mark Sidwell in Partygate.

The theatre remains the place he gets leads. He was nominated for best actor at the 2008 Irish Times Theatre Awards for Uncle Vanya at the Gate, played Rock 'n' Roll at the Duke of York's, and appeared in King Charles III on Broadway in 2015. On screen he is still working steadily, with two De Gaulle films dated 2026 casting him as the British soldier and politician Edward Spears.