Iain Glen

Iain Alan Sutherland Glen was born in Edinburgh in 1961 and began where serious British actors begin, with theatre and prestige film. In 1990 alone he played the explorer John Hanning Speke in Mountains of the Moon and took the lead in Silent Scream, which won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival. He was, at thirty, exactly the sort of actor the industry files under future knighthood.

That is not how it went, and it worked out better. Glen turned out to be the man you cast when a character has to be loyal past the point of self-respect and still keep his dignity. Jorah Mormont carried that across eight seasons of Game of Thrones, a man repeatedly sent away by the person he has organised his life around, coming back each time without ever asking to be pitied. He carries the same restraint into Alfred Roberts in The Iron Lady, a father seen almost entirely through his daughter's memory, and into his Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, played from the edges of somebody else's story.

He has also spent thirty years cheerfully doing genre work without condescending to it, and the schlock is often where he is most fun: Manfred Powell in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Dr. Isaacs across three Resident Evil films, Richard the Lionheart in Kingdom of Heaven. Lately the television has been better than that. He carried Jack Taylor for six years, played Bruce Wayne on Titans, Magnus MacMillan on The Rig, and Dr. Pete Nichols on Silo.