Brian Blessed, OBE (/ˈblɛsɪd/; born 9 October 1936) is an English actor, writer, presenter, and comedian. He is known for his booming voice and his roles in Z-Cars, I, Claudius, Blackadder, and Flash Gordon.\n', '

Brian Blessed was born on 9 October 1936 at Montagu Hospital in Mexborough, Yorkshire, the son of William Blessed (1906–2005), a socialist coal miner at Hickleton Main Colliery (and himself the son of a coal miner), and Hilda Wall (1909–1997). Blessed\'s great-great-grandfather, Jabez Blessed, was the father of 13 children and worked as a china and glass dealer in Brigg, Lincolnshire; many of Blessed\'s relatives hail from Brigg. Blessed went to Bolton on Dearne Secondary Modern School and started drama training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.\n', '

One of Blessed\'s earliest roles was that of PC "Fancy" Smith in the BBC television series Z-Cars, between 1962 and 1965. In 1966, he appeared in a production of Incident at Vichy at the Phoenix Theatre in London. In 1967, he played Porthos in a 10-part BBC adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Blessed also had minor roles in cult TV series such as The Avengers (1967, 1969) and the original Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (1969). He appeared as William Woodcock in the Yorkshire Television series Boy Dominic (1974). He played Caesar Augustus in the BBC Two drama series I, Claudius (1976) and Basileos in The Aphrodite Inheritance (1979). He hosted a docudrama on the life of Johann Sebastian Bach called The Joy of Bach (1978), in which he also played Bach in a number of scenes.\n', '

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