Robert Bathurst
Robert Guy Bathurst is a British actor.
Bathurst was born in the Gold Coast in February 1957, where his father was working as a management consultant. In 1959, his family moved to Ballybrack, Dublin, Ireland, and Bathurst attended school in Killiney and later was enrolled at Headfort, an Irish boarding school. In 1966, the family moved back to England and Bathurst transferred to Worth School in Sussex, where he took up amateur dramatics. At the age of 18, he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge to read law. At Cambridge he joined the Footlights group.
After graduating, he took up acting full-time and made his professional stage debut in 1983, playing Tim Allgood in Michael Frayn's Noises Off, which ran for a year at the Savoy Theatre. To broaden his knowledge of working on stage, he joined the National Theatre. He supplemented his stage roles in the 1980s with television roles, appearing in comedies such as the aborted pilot episode of Blackadder, Chelmsford 123, The Lenny Henry Show and the first episode of Red Dwarf. In 1991, he won his first major television role playing Mark Taylor in the semi-autobiographical BBC sitcom Joking Apart, written by Steven Moffat. Although only thirteen episodes were made, the role remains Bathurst's favourite of his whole career. After Joking Apart concluded, he was cast as pompous management consultant David Marsden in the ITV comedy drama Cold Feet, which ran for five series from 1998 to 2003 and again for four further series from 2016 to 2020.
Since 2003, Bathurst has played a fictional prime minister in the BBC sitcom My Dad's the Prime Minister; Mark Thatcher in the fact-based drama Coup!; and a man whose daughter goes missing in the ITV thriller The Stepfather. He made a return to theatre roles, playing Vershinin in The Three Sisters, Adrien in the two-hander Members Only, government whip Alistair in Whipping it Up, and the title role in Alex. In the following years he starred in the television dramas The Pillars of the Earth, Downton Abbey and Hattie and joined the cast of Wild at Heart in 2012. He appeared in his first Noël Coward play, Present Laughter, in 2010 and followed it with a role in Blithe Spirit that same year and again in 2011. He is married and has four children.
Early life
Robert Guy Bathurst was born in Accra, Gold Coast, in February 1957 to Philip Charles Metcalfe Bathurst, a descendant of politician Charles Bathurst and kinsman of the Earls Bathurst and Viscounts Bledisloe, and his wife Gillian. His father was a major in the Royal Engineers during the Second World War and was working in West Africa as a management consultant. His mother was a physiotherapist. They had two other children, Nicholas and Charlotte. The family lived in Ghana until 1959, when they moved to Ballybrack, Dublin, Ireland. Bathurst and his brother attended two schools in Dublin – the Holy Child School in Killiney and a school in Ballsbridge – before being sent to Headfort, a preparatory school in Kells, County Meath. He compared the time he and his brother, who were Catholics, spent at the Anglican boarding school to Lord of the Flies; "we were incarcerated in a huge, stinking, Georgian house, where we were treated very brutally".In 1966, the family moved to England and Bathurst was sent to board at Worth School in Sussex. At the age of 13, he began acting in minor skits and revues and read old copies of Plays and Players magazine, "studying floor plans of theatres and reading about new theatres being built". He had first become interested in acting when his family saw a pantomime at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin and he watched actors waiting for their cues in the wings.
Aged 18, Bathurst left school to read law at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He spent much of his time there performing in the Cambridge Footlights alongside Hugh Laurie, Rory McGrath and Emma Thompson. From 1977 to 1978, he was the secretary of the group and, from 1978 to 1979, he was the president. Among the Footlights Revues in which he participated were Stage Fright in 1978, which he also co-wrote and Nightcap in 1979. He also directed and appeared in the Footlights pantomime Aladdin as Widow Twankey during the 1978–79 season. He took the Bar Vocational Course at the University of Law, in London, which allowed him to go on to become a practising barrister, but stuck to acting instead.
Acting career
Early career
After leaving Cambridge, Bathurst spent a year touring Australia in the Footlights Revue Botham, The Musical, which he described as "a bunch of callow youths flying round doing press conferences and chat shows". Although he enjoyed his work with Footlights, he did not continue performing with the group, worrying that he would be "washed up at 35 having coat-tailed on their success through the early part of career". After leaving, he found that he was considered a dilettante, which resulted in it taking him longer than expected to be accepted as a serious actor. His first professional role out of university was in the BBC Radio 4 series Injury Time, alongside fellow Footlights performers Rory McGrath and Emma Thompson. His first role for television came in 1982, when he appeared as Prince Henry in the pilot episode of Blackadder. He had already appeared in a training video by director Geoff Posner and got the role of Henry by way of thanks. The character was recast and downgraded when the series was commissioned as The Black Adder.Bathurst's professional stage debut came the next year when he joined the second cast of Michael Frayn's Noises Off at the Savoy Theatre. He replaced Roger Lloyd-Pack as Tim Allgood and stayed at the Savoy for a year. Between roles, he worked as a television presenter for BBC East. After declining an offer to be a presenter of That's Life! he joined the National Theatre in 1984, where he appeared as a background actor in Saint Joan. He regards it as "the most demoralising" job he has ever had but was grateful for the theatre experience it gave him. The following year, he appeared at The Man in the Moon, a pub theatre in Chelsea, in Judgement, a two-hour monologue on cannibalism. The opening night audience was made up of three people but after good reviews in the national press the audience grew to an average of fifteen.
A casting director for the James Bond film The Living Daylights persuaded Bathurst to audition for Bond. Bathurst believes that his "ludicrous audition" was only "an arm-twisting exercise" because the producers wanted to pressure Timothy Dalton to take the role by telling him they were still auditioning other actors. Bathurst noted "I could never have done it – Bond actors are always very different from me".
He continued to make minor appearances in television throughout the 1980s; in 1987, he auditioned for the role of Dave Lister in the BBC North science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf. The part eventually went to Craig Charles but Bathurst was given a role in the first episode of the first series as Frank Todhunter, second officer on the ship, who is killed in the first ten minutes. Ten years later, Bathurst was invited to reprise the role when a storyline in the series allowed former characters to return, but filming commitments prevented him from appearing. In 1989, he appeared in Malcolm Bradbury's Anything More Would Be Greedy for Anglia Television, playing Dennis Medlam, MP. The programme was broadcast in 1990 to little fanfare. In 1990, he performed on Up Yer News, a live topical programme broadcast on BSB.
''Joking Apart''
While working on Up Yer News, Bathurst auditioned for a one-off television comedy called Joking Apart. Earlier in the day, he noticed a fellow Up Yer News performer reading the script to prepare for his own audition. As Bathurst went into the audition room, his colleague was leaving and told Bathurst he would "break his legs" if he got the part, a threat that seemed not to be "entirely jocular". Bathurst got the part and the pilot of Joking Apart was broadcast as an installment of the BBC Two Comic Asides strand. It returned for two series in 1993 and 1995. Bathurst appeared as sitcom writer Mark Taylor in the series. After the first series was broadcast, a critic called Bathurst the "Best Comedy Newcomer of 1993".The show was punctuated by fantasy sequences in which his character performed his thoughts as a stand-up routine in a small club. In the commentary and the interview on the DVD, Bathurst says that he was told that they would be re-shot after filming everything else, an idea abandoned because of the expense. He has an idea of re-filming the sequences 'now', as his older self, to give them a more retrospective feeling. He has also said that he believes Mark was too "designery" and wishes that he had "roughened him up a bit". The role is his favourite of his whole career; he has described it as "the most enjoyable job I will ever do" and considers several episodes of the series to be "timeless, beautifully constructed farces which will endure". Bathurst is often recognised for his appearance in this series, mentioning that "Drunks stop me on public transport and tell me details of the plot of their favourite episode". As punishment for arriving late for the series one press launch at the Café Royal in Regent Street, London, writer Steven Moffat pledged to write an episode in which Mark is naked throughout. To a large extent, this vow is realised in the second series.
Between 1991 and 1995, Bathurst also appeared on television in No Job for a Lady, The House of Eliott and The Detectives and on stage in The Choice, George Bernard Shaw's Getting Married at Chichester with Dorothy Tutin and Gogol's The Nose adapted by Alastair Beaton, which played in Nottingham and Bucharest. He also filmed a role in The Wind in the Willows as St John Weasel.