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.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)