Richard Briers ✝

Richard David Briers CBE (14 January 1934 – 17 February 2013) was an English actor whose five-decade career encompassed film, radio, stage and television. Briers first came to prominence as George Starling in Marriage Lines (1961–66), but it was a few years later, when he narrated Roobarb (1974–76) and Noah and Nelly in... SkylArk (1976–77) and played Tom Good in the BBC sitcom The Good Life (1975–78), that he became a household name. He starred as Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles (1984–89), and had a leading role as Hector in Monarch of the Glen (2000–05). From the late 1980s, with Kenneth Branagh as director, he performed Shakespearean roles in Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996) and As You Like It (2006). Briers was born on 14 January 1934 in Raynes Park, Surrey, the son of Joseph Benjamin Briers (1901-1980) and his second wife Morna Phyllis (1909-1992), daughter of Frederick Richardson, of the Indian Civil Service. He was the first cousin once removed of actor Terry-Thomas (Terry-Thomas was his father's cousin). He spent his childhood at Raynes Park in a flat, Number 2 Pepys Court, behind the now demolished Rialto cinema, and later at Guildford. His father, Joseph Briers, was the son of a stockbroker, of a family of Middlesex tenant farmers; a gregarious and popular man, he contended with a nervous disposition, and drifted between jobs, spending most of his life as a bookmaker but also working as, amongst other things, an estate agent's clerk and a factory worker for an air filter manufacturer, as well as being a gifted amateur singer who attended classes at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His mother, Morna Briers, was a concert pianist and a drama and music teacher, and a member of Equity, who wished for a showbusiness career, having acted in her youth. The couple had met when Joseph Briers asked Morna to stand in for his regular pianist for a performance; by this time his first marriage had collapsed and six months later they had entered a relationship. The family occasionally received money from a wealthy relation, and Briers' maternal grandparents paid for his education, despite not being particularly well-off, and having lived in slightly reduced circumstances in India before returning to England and coming to live at Wimbledon.