Richard Briers - Other Work

Other Work

Briers has spent much of his career in theatre work, including appearances in plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In 1967, one of his earliest successes was playing alongside Michael Hordern and Celia Johnson in the London production of Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking. Briers was a member of Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company, taking on classical and Shakespearean roles including Malvolio in Twelfth Night and the title roles in King Lear and Uncle Vanya. Briers has also appeared in nine of Kenneth Branagh's films, such as Henry V (as Bardolph, 1989), Much Ado About Nothing (as Signor Leonato, 1993) and as Polonius in Hamlet (1996).

Briers is also a familiar voice actor, with numerous commercials, including adverts for the Midland Bank in which he was the voice of the company's Griffin symbol, and the animated children's series Roobarb (1974), Noah and Nelly in... SkylArk (1976) and Bob the Builder (2005) to his credit. He also provided the voice of Fiver in the animated film adaptation of Watership Down (1978). Between 1984 and 1986 he made a series of commercials for the Ford Sierra done in a sitcom style portraying the Sierra as "one of the family".

His work in radio includes playing Bertie Wooster in a series of adaptations of the Jeeves novels by P.G. Wodehouse, Dr. Simon Sparrow in BBC Radio 4's adaptions of Richard Gordon's Doctor in the House and Doctor At Large (1968) (currently repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra), a retired thespian in a series of six plays with Stanley Baxter Two Pipe Problems, and later the play Not Talking, commissioned for BBC Radio 3 by Mike Bartlett.