Brian Blessed

The son of a socialist coal miner at Hickleton Main Colliery who also played cricket for the Yorkshire second team, Brian Blessed was born in Mexborough in 1936 and became famous early as PC "Fancy" Smith in Z-Cars. He has spent the six decades since being the loudest man in British acting, a reputation he has never once tried to correct.

The voice does obscure the technique. His Augustus in the BBC's 1976 I, Claudius is a genuinely subtle piece of work, an emperor who is affable and slightly dim in company and completely ruthless the moment the room empties. Four years later Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon gave him the bellowing winged warrior whose single line has outlived most of the film around it. King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder is the same energy turned into a joke. He can do the classics straight too: Exeter in Henry V, Antonio in Much Ado About Nothing, the Ghost in the 1996 Hamlet, and on stage Bustopher Jones and Old Deuteronomy in the original 1981 London production of Cats.

The late career is almost entirely voice, and it is where he has been most widely heard. Boss Nass in Star Wars: Episode I, Clayton and the Tarzan yell in Disney's Tarzan, the Pirate King in The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, Santa Claus in The Amazing World of Gumball, and Grampy Rabbit in Peppa Pig. The same man is a Roman emperor and a preschool rabbit, and he gives both the full instrument. He was appointed OBE in 2016 for services to the arts and charity.