(17 December 1944 - 5 May 2024)
The British actor Bernard Hill, who has died aged 79, may well be remembered for one outstanding role he played on television from 1979. In Alan Bleasdale’s The Black Stuff and the subsequent series of The Boys from the Blackstuff, Hill played Yosser Hughes, an out of work road mender who, when scouting for any other sort of work would say “Gizza job, go on, I can do that”. The plea became an iconic phrase during Margaret Thatcher’s time as PM and it stuck with the three million unemployed.
Hill became tired of being associated with just one role as he had already had a wide-ranging career. However, he later appreciated the fact and accepted it as a badge of honour. He was born to a Roman Catholic family in Manchester to a mining father and a mother who worked for ICI. He attended the Xaverian Catholic College and planned to be a quantity surveyor but changed his mind after meeting Mike Leigh and trained at the Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama. One of his first TV appearances was in Leigh’s Hard Labour.
He went on to do theatre work in The Cherry Orchard, Macbeth, A View from the Bridge and Willy Russell’s Beatles show John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert which transferred from Liverpool to the West End. He played John Lennon.
On film he played a sergeant in Gandhi, Captain Edward Smith in Titanic and worked with Mel Gibson on The Bounty, with Clint Eastwood in True Crime, and played opposite Pauline Collins in Willie Russell’s Shirley Valentine. Later on he was King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings films. He was also David Livingstone in The Mountains of the Moon, played a straight man meeting a disfigured gay man in Skallagrigg, and he was part of the plot to kill Hitler in Valkyrie with Tom Cruise.
On television, apart from Yosser Hughes, he was in the BBC’s Shakespeare history plays Henry VI and Richard III. He did Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar, Peter Bowker’s From There to Here, about a family in the sweet-making business, and was the Duke of Norfolk in the highly-praised Wolf Hall series based on the novel by Hilary Mantel.
Bernard Hill was a very versatile actor who shone in a multiplicity of different roles, and if he is only remembered for The Black Stuff, it will only prove what an outstanding performer he was. He was married to the American actress Marianna Hill and they have a son Gabriel. At the time of his death, Bernard Hill was engaged to his fiancée Alison.
MICHAEL DARVELL
